Peer Advising

When I was a freshman in college, I was given a peer adviser, whose job it was to check in one me throughout the year and help with class selection/advice. So, why not apply this to my campus EMS squad? The way this would work is by having probationary members paired up with senior members who run the calls. Each week the advisee and adviser meet to discuss the probationary member's progress on calls, address questions the new member may have, and to assess how best to help the new member continue to improve. This would enhance our quality of care exponentially. Just imagine, new members and old members exchanging knowledge on issues and learning from each other. The probationary members would feel more confident and our senior members could increase teamwork on scenes, feeling confident in the probationary member's skills and knowledge base.

My goals for my EMS squad are to create a higher quality of care for our patients, make better EMTs/FRs, increase teamwork on scenes, and instill a sense of accomplishment and pride in what we do. This is just one way.

Get out there and VOTE!

This past weekend, I went with a group of 57 students from my school to Washington, DC for the Rally to Restore Sanity. We left at 11pm on Friday and got to DC at 7am Saturday, by 8am the Mall was filled. The final numbers on attendance was somewhere in the ballpark of 215,000. With that said, the rally was incredible with Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart using humor to present an very serious issue in this country. In the spirit of what was said at the rally and its overall message of "we may disagree, but lets at least try to work together", GET OUT THERE AND VOTE! Its a right and we should use it to steer this country in the right direction, Republican or Democrat. Enjoy the polls people!

EMS: An Urban Study (The Idea)

I promised an update so here it is...I have just barely scratched the surface in my research. College= long, arduous hours of continuous, unrelenting assignments from multiple professors who do not communicate, nor understand the concept that we could possibly be taking more than one class. With that aside, the premise of the paper follows the development of EMS (as I noted in my earlier post) and with this, the corresponding development of urban hospitals and the affect of military research in emergency care in the field on the urban setting. My case study will be, most likely, a focus San Francisco EMS.

So, that's basically it for now. Things will start to move more once mid-November hits and finals inch closer and closer (it's like Halloween all over again! Yikes!), that is when the professors usually give us a little bit more leeway with our daily assignments to focus on the multitude of papers/finals/projects, etc. that will be assigned on top of those daily assignments. In any case, stay tuned.