5 Hard Questions EMS 2.0 Will Need to Address

“Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life… as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.”

- Booker T. Washington

With multiple premiers of The Chronicles of EMS and a wave of enthusiasm from the EMS Today conference in Baltimore, the future of EMS looks bright, blindingly-bright. I’m incredibly optimistic about where this crazy experiment in EMS is headed, but I also see some big hurdles in our path.

Put on your shades and let’s talk about what I feel are the five biggest challenges to EMS reform.

1.) We’ve been talking a lot about unity and standardization, but individual EMS systems are unique in every way. How do you influence standardization and still allow for the tremendous leeway required for EMS agencies to be optimized for the communities that they serve? Can EMS agencies be different in geography, financial resources, administrative structure, culture, call volume, compensation and certification/education level and still find enough unity to advance the profession together?

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Hard Questions About EMT Life

                            …. Answered

I asked for the questions and I got them, in spades. I put the challenge out there; What’s the hardest question you’re willing to ask about the life and job of an EMT? As usual, I started out with high expectations and then was blown away by the awesome response.

In fact I got so many great questions I needed to divide this post into two parts. So here are my answers to some tough reader questions about the life and work of an EMT. Thanks for asking them.

I’ll post the second installment next time.

1. How do you deal with smells, blood, guts, disfigurement and dead bodies?@BrownCoatEMT via Twitter

I’ve never been real great with smells. I’ve come close to puking but never full-on hurled on a call. some people go so far as to carry Vick’s vapo-rub to put on their lip. They say it helps. Me, I just decide to bear it. Though there have been moments that if I’d had the Vick’s jar, I’d have used it.

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What Is Epinepherine?

A quick inside tip on field instructors; we all have our favorite questions to ask new riders. Those questions that help us get a more firm understanding of where our students knowledge base rests. What kind of practical knowledge are they carrying out into the field? Some of them are fair questions. Some of them aren’t. That’s life.

One of my favorite questions to ask that new rider early in the ride along is, “So what is epinephrine anyway?” (For the record, this is an extremely fair question.) I’ve found this to be a telling conversation because the scope of the question gives the student a lot of rope. This is a question where the student can choose to be shockingly simple or impressively complex. The choice is theirs.

I ask this question regardless of the students experience or training. I’ve had brand new EMT students knock the question out of the park and I’ve had experienced paramedics strike out miserably. All baseball metaphors aside, it’s a telling question. It speaks to a care givers understanding of the drugs we are able to administer. (Yes, all of us.) It’s revealing about ones understanding of the autonomic nervous system and it exposes an individuals understanding of basic pathophysiology.

When I ask the question, the answer I’m looking for is something like this:

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