How does a paramedic handles those three words says a lot about the kind of provider that they are.  Despite all of the training and continuing education one might seek out, there are still going to be situations where we just are not sure what to do.  We will encounter conditions we have just read about and never seen firsthand.  There will be tools in our bags that we might never pull out during our careers, and in many cases, never having to use something like a Quick-Trach or a needle crich is never a bad thing.  None the less, we need to be ready for anything. This is where personal responsibility comes into play.  If someone does not understand something, they need to speak up when asked if they have any questions.  They need to be ready to seek out the answers if they do not understand.  For example: CPAP is still relatively new to my service.  We have had it now for just about a year, and as a supervisor, I am not getting nearly as many patient contacts as I used to.  In the course of my field time, I have had to use CPAP six times, and on three of those, I did not feel as though I had done as good as I could have.  I did not feel that the seal was tight enough, and as a result, the device was not working as well as it could. I decided it was time to ask a respiratory therapist that I know if he had any tips for how to achieve a better seal, and he was able to give me some great advice: “if the patient is able, let them control 90% of the mask when it is being applied.  Get it tight and comfortable for them, and work on tightening the straps when they have it placed.”  On the next CPAP call that I had, I gave this a shot, and it worked really well. I had identified a part of my patient care that I was not doing as well as I could, sought out advice, applied that advice, and was now a better provider as...

Communication is such a huge part of this job.  We need to be able to communicate with our patients and get information out of them, we need to be able to speak on a radio (which is sometimes easier said than done) and we need to be able to translate what our patients say into medical jargen so the doctors and nurses we give report to fully understand what they are going to be dealing with.  In addition to all of this, we need to be able to communicate with our partners as well. Jamie was my third partner in my career, and she was the one that I worked with the longest.  The two of us were partners for close to two years, working evenings and weekend overnights.  We had some great times, and did some really good calls over the years.  Our styles were completely different.  I was more aggressive medically, where she was quite a bit more on the conservative side, but because of that I learned a lot about holding back, and what to treat and not to treat. We would seem to commonly encounter a problem in the street though: while our silent communication skills, we were not always able to read each other’s minds.  It was on a slow shift that we solved this problem.  Jamie and I decided that we were going to create our own language, one that was spoken by touching different parts of our face to let the other person know what was needed in more of a silent fashion. For example: there is a crying woman sitting on a bed, not talking with her boyfriend/husband looming over her.  Jamie might tap her temple with her index finger which, according to our silent language dictionary, says “let’s clear the room so I can talk to her alone.”  I’d say to the husband, “Sir, can we go take a look at her medicine?”  or “Can you hold the door for me while I get the stretcher in?” At its peak, we had just about fifteen different silent phrases we’d “speak” to each other on calls, covering everything from “This is ridiculous, why are we here?” ...

Over the last month, I have been trying to follow the Occupy Wall Street movement.  I say “trying” because I have a tough time figuring out what their unified message really is.  Their communication attempts with the public have been highly ineffective and fractured.  No one seems to want to speak for the group, and all that seems to keep coming out is “down with big business!” Ironically, most of what I have read has been via social media through Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.  I must say, I find it rather amusing to see someone send a Tweet out about how bad corporate America is, and on the bottom of the box on Tweetdeck, it reads “Sent via Twitter for iPhone.”  That’s right: this person who is bad mouthing corporate America is paying a monthly bill to it to be able to share their message. Change takes time and efforts.  One Tweet I saw that I found to be particularly interesting was one that read: “I was promised a job, go to college, get a job is the promise, I did my part.”  If a person wants real accomplishment they cannot sit back and expect it to be handed to them on a silver platter.  There is a certain level of personal responsibility that comes along with it and sometimes things take a little more work than expected.  You cannot always expect people to meet you half way.  Sometimes, you need to go a little farther. Much like Occupy Wall Street, EMS 2.0 is a grass roots “bottom up” movement spearheaded by street providers to try and enhance their ability to do their job.  I think that there some important lessons that those of us who are invested in EMS 2.0 can take from what I feel are some glaring failures of the Occupy Wall Street movement: 1.  Have a message — Don’t just blindly demand change.  Know what you are asking for, and have someone who is willing to step forward and speak for the group.  Show your numbers, but have a plan! 2.  Don’t demand change, make it — Far too often, we look at those around us and above us and...

My name is Scott, and I am a PC. I admit it: PCs have been my life and my passion for quite a number of years.  I remember my first one when I was 8 years old.  I still speak DOS fluently, in fact, the computer that I am typing this on right now is a computer that I built myself a little more than two years ago. That said, I am still mourning the death of Steve Jobs today. In addition to my love of PCs, I also have an affinity for gadgets.  Just the other night during some downtime at work, I was replying to tweets on my iPhone while reading a PDF on my iPAD, all while listening to music on my iPOD.  I have them all, and I love them all and a day does not go by where I am not using them.  Steve Jobs revolutionized mobile media for me.  He changed the way I surf the net, he changed how I listened to music, and he changed how I communicated with people. You Android users out there should be counting your blessings as well.  If it was not for the iPhone, do you think the Android would be half as good as it is?  Jobs did not just challenge his own company; he challenged everyone else as well.  He pushed them to make their products better just to stay competitive, and they did the same right back to Jobs and Apple.  Because of that competition, we have what we have today. I found a couple of inspirational quotes from Steve Jobs as I was reading through an article about him on the Huffington Post today that I thought I would share: “That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity.  Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.  But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” — BusinessWeek interview form 1998. I love this quote, and I feel it embodies everything that EMS 2.0 stands for.  Make things simple again and start over.  Don’t over complicate things...

With that headline, one might think this is an article about Calvin Johnson and the resurgence of the Detroit Lions.  I wish that were true! Is anyone else tired of hearing about the Detroit Fire Department? In a recent story reported by the Fox affiliate in Detroit who has been following the department’s struggles rather closely, it was reported that they had not even ordered the promised 20+ ambulances promised to be on the road by January of 2012.  Not even ordered yet?  Come on! While it does not take long to get a truck on the road once it is licensed and put together, the steps leading up to that point can take some time.  Lettering needs to be decided on, equipment needs to be ordered, and the trucks need to be manufactured.  Once again, the Detroit Fire Department has dropped the ball. This brings up the question: when is enough enough?  When is the City of Detroit going to step up, tell the Fire Department they are not cutting it, and start looking elsewhere for EMS coverage?  While that can be a difficult undertaking, especially in a city in the financial dire straits that Detroit is in, it may be a necessary step to provide a better service to the city.  In other settings around the country, cities would be calling for the heads of the administrators of a department that has failed as badly as Detroit Fire has, but it almost seems like their answers of “we’re doing the best that we can” and the promises of improvement are enough to keep the city pacified. Providing EMS service in an urban setting is a difficult undertaking.  Providing quality service is exponentially more difficult, and yes, there is a difference.  Volumes tend to be higher, and acuity is lower.  Sometimes convincing municipalities that maybe an entire fleet of paramedic level ambulances is not the answer to the problem is difficult.  Detroit is in the perfect situation to bring someone in who can say “trust us, let us run the service.  The calls will be done, and people will be taken care of.”  Who knows, it could be the perfect blank canvas to...