What Makes A Good EMT (Part 2)

Still struggling with the good EMT thing. I’m glad to be at your service. Grab a pen and answer these questions for yourself.

• What’s your internal bias toward dealing with patients and their challenges?  When patients have needs that don’t meet with your expectations how do you tend to react? Could you do that better? How?
• What’s it like to be your partner? How do people feel about you after they’ve run calls with you? Is that by your design?
• How do you handle it when you fail? When you have a bad call or things don’t go right? Are you willing to be fallible before your peers and own your mistakes? If you really felt that you were good at what you do, what would be the ideal way to address these inevitable errors?
• What is your tolerance for learning. Are you still in an active learning process or have you stagnated in your growth since you entered the field. What did you learn today?

Continue Reading…

The Oklahoma State Trooper vs EMS Mess

This has gone on long enough and gotten big enough that I feel compelled to say something about it. By now I’m sure you’ve seen and heard all about the Oklahoma State Trooper / EMS roadside circus.

First we had the cell phone video of an upset family member recording an odd looking scuffle between an Oklahoma State Trooper and an ambulance crew on the side of the road. It starts with a narrative by the family member and ends with the ambulance dude in a disturbing looking choke hold.

Then the driver of the ambulance went public and started giving news interviews, stating he was compelled to do so by the statements of the trooper in his report. Somehow he felt that the media spotlight would be the best place to get this off his chest. He was followed by his partner, calling for the officers badge on The Early Show.

The OSP finally released the dash cam video showing an ambulance yielding appropriately to the officer and never taking the aggressive swing at the trooper as initially reported. Then the biggest clown of all chimed in when the OSP lawyer held a press conference to say that everything we saw on the tape was normal and appropriate except for the gross negligence of the ambulance crew failing to yield for a full 24 seconds. What?

Continue Reading…

What Makes A Great Partner?

Everyone has their own idea of what makes a shift a good shift. Each of us carries our own magic recipe. Perhaps a little trauma with a dash of cardiac thrown in. Add a choice rig from the fleet and a dispatcher who still remembers the last burrito run you made for her. Sprinkle liberally with just the right amount of down time and voila!

Wait. We’re missing the most essential ingredient. A great shift can never be a great shift without a great partner. That’s the best thing about EMS, all the awesome characters you get to work along side. Some would say that when your mixing your recipe for a great shift, your partner isn’t the most important factor, it’s the only factor. I tend to agree.

Think about it. You could give me the worst shift schedule and the crummiest rig in the fleet. Make me run the worst calls that come. Hold me over late. But if you give me the right partner, we’re going to have some fun. There’s just no stopping us.

The inverse is true as well. Put me in the best medic unit on a prime shift. Dispatch me to the most cherry-picked calls and send me in early when I’m done. But if my partner’s some serious, stick-in-the-mud who couldn’t find fun if you stapled it to his forehead, guess what? It’s going to suck. There’s just no nice way to put it. The partner makes all the difference.

So I got to thinking … no really. What makes an awesome partner? Here’s my list.

Continue Reading…