Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Really?
I am at work tonight and I overheard another EMT saying to another group of EMTs, "what other job in the world allows for a non-college educated person to make a steady salary and have multiple days off?" He was saying this to explain why this job is so great. Tell me something, how many people say this about their jobs seriously? More importantly, how sad is it that this is what makes this job great?
Teamwork Part II
My last post on Teamwork was designed to give an idea of how two people working towards a common goal can come together to help an individual in need. That is what being an EMT is all about. Good physicians and nurses confer with their fellow healthcare professionals in order to complete the puzzle of a patient's illness and provide the proper care.
Recently I ran a call that I feel is fit to be used as an example in teamwork. I was working with a fairly new employee at my company out of a base that I am not very familiar with. This is a recipe for a bad shift as I have had a recent streak of partners who are new to the job and are therefore in the stage of feeling invincible and/or full of themselves; simply put, they do not like to listen, take criticism, or work as a team. This was a lucky situation for me, I ended up with a partner with some past experience with another company taking 911 calls. We immediately hit it off and by the time of our first call, we were already working well together. He knew the northern half of our response area, I knew the southern. Our first call went off without a hitch; we communicated well and got the patient packaged, transported, and safe at home without any problems, besides a malfunctioning radio. Our second call was for a cold response to a facility in the southern part of our response area and proved to be an interesting case.
Like I have said before, communication is key, if you can look at your partner and know his/her next move, you can function well as a team. If you can talk to your partner and confer on decisions, the patient is going to get the best care. Two heads are always better than one.
We get a cold response for a male with lower abdominal pain. On arrival, the nurse hands us a packet of information on the patient. We ask the nurse what is going on with the patient, the nurse seems to know very little about the situation other than he has had pain for 5 days and now it is getting worse. The patient is ambulatory in his room; we convince him to sit on his bed while I grab vitals and my partner starts an assessment. We find the upper right quadrant of his abdomen is distended with rigidity.
On the way over to the facility, my partner and I were discussing how we would go about handling the scene (who would do what, what we would be looking for, and what we might expect). This is another aspect of teamwork; bouncing ideas off your partner is NOT a bad thing!
After we find the patient's abdomen is distended and rigid we decide without more than a glance that we are going HOT to the ER, especially with the patient presenting with a fever. Long story short, we got to the hospital and found that the patient, among other issues, had an SPO2 stat of 91% (despite not reporting shortness of breath or difficulty breathing). The next day, I checked on the patient, he had been admitted, that is all they would/could tell me. I hope he did alright, but I know that if he is doing better, it is in large part due to the teamwork that my partner and I had and our quick decision making and assessment abilities.
Recently I ran a call that I feel is fit to be used as an example in teamwork. I was working with a fairly new employee at my company out of a base that I am not very familiar with. This is a recipe for a bad shift as I have had a recent streak of partners who are new to the job and are therefore in the stage of feeling invincible and/or full of themselves; simply put, they do not like to listen, take criticism, or work as a team. This was a lucky situation for me, I ended up with a partner with some past experience with another company taking 911 calls. We immediately hit it off and by the time of our first call, we were already working well together. He knew the northern half of our response area, I knew the southern. Our first call went off without a hitch; we communicated well and got the patient packaged, transported, and safe at home without any problems, besides a malfunctioning radio. Our second call was for a cold response to a facility in the southern part of our response area and proved to be an interesting case.
Like I have said before, communication is key, if you can look at your partner and know his/her next move, you can function well as a team. If you can talk to your partner and confer on decisions, the patient is going to get the best care. Two heads are always better than one.
We get a cold response for a male with lower abdominal pain. On arrival, the nurse hands us a packet of information on the patient. We ask the nurse what is going on with the patient, the nurse seems to know very little about the situation other than he has had pain for 5 days and now it is getting worse. The patient is ambulatory in his room; we convince him to sit on his bed while I grab vitals and my partner starts an assessment. We find the upper right quadrant of his abdomen is distended with rigidity.
On the way over to the facility, my partner and I were discussing how we would go about handling the scene (who would do what, what we would be looking for, and what we might expect). This is another aspect of teamwork; bouncing ideas off your partner is NOT a bad thing!
After we find the patient's abdomen is distended and rigid we decide without more than a glance that we are going HOT to the ER, especially with the patient presenting with a fever. Long story short, we got to the hospital and found that the patient, among other issues, had an SPO2 stat of 91% (despite not reporting shortness of breath or difficulty breathing). The next day, I checked on the patient, he had been admitted, that is all they would/could tell me. I hope he did alright, but I know that if he is doing better, it is in large part due to the teamwork that my partner and I had and our quick decision making and assessment abilities.
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