What patient transport device would you use for the following situation? 22-year-old female c/o extreme pain to left shin, ankle, and foot following a fall. Pt is unable to bear weight on foot. Patient is located on a steep, wet, grassy hill, and is 200 feet from a concrete walkway. After reaching the walkway there is a large staircase down to the ground level. Stair chair is useless because of the lawn and the patients need to have their left leg extended. No other trauma is suspected.
In my opinion, this is a great time to deploy the Reeves. It works perfectly in this situation, allowing the EMT’s to safely transport the women off the grass and down the stairs safely and quickly. Now, I know that I have already lost you RI trained EMT’s who have no idea what I am talking about. I consider this to be a gross miscarriage of the EMT-B scope of practice. So, let this article serve as notice, to all of the uninitiated, of the great importance of the Reeves brand flexible stretcher. It is so important to us New Jerseyans that it is a mandatory piece of equipment.
Continue reading ‘Where is the Reeves?’
Today is September 11th 2009. Eight years ago I sat in my geometry class. It was the second day of high school for me. Somebody came in and turned on the TV. I will never forget sitting there and watching the second tower come down. In the minutes that followed there were scattered random rumors, some of them true, of other planes crashing, of car bombs exploding and of people dying. It was a very surreal and scary moment for us sitting there in Mrs. LeBlanc’s math class.
I’m from central New Jersey; you can see lower Manhattan from the hills in my town. As you can imagine, a lot of us lost people we cared for on that terrible day.
I just wanted to write this to remind everyone who now works at Brown EMS to take a minute today and reflect on our brothers and sisters who died that day doing the very same jobs we do everyday. The Fire Department of the City of New York lost 343 members that day, 2 of them were FDNY paramedics. An additional 8 EMT’s and paramedics from private companies were killed as they helped people to escape. As is often the case, they were running in as civilians were running out.
It takes a very special person to do what we do. So to the supervisors and volunteers of Brown EMS:
Thank you.
Stay safe out there. Let’s make it another semester where everybody goes home.
Timothy Satty
When I went through EMT – B training, the idea of using a tourniquet was frowned upon. In fact, the answer they usually gave was something along the lines of “only as a last resort to save someone’s life…and even then be careful.” We learned that using a tourniquet was a dangerous last-ditch procedure that often did more harm then good. It made sense to me at the time, “if an EMT cut off the blood supply to a limb, the limb would quickly die.” It would be a bad day if I killed a patient’s arm just because I didn’t give my pressure dressing another few minutes to form a clot.
What we didn’t know at the time was that the instructors didn’t have any hard evidence that tourniquets were bad; they were just repeating things that they had been told. More importantly, patients have died during those “few minutes” that EMT’s have waited for the dressings to clot.
Continue reading ‘The rise of the tourniquet, or… a lot of EMS is based on myth and assumption.’
I think that at Brown we do a lot of things right. However, I have a question to ask: why is our jump kit so heavy? That red bag weighs a ton. I consider myself to be a pretty big guy, but even I have trouble lugging that stupid bag up five flights of Keeney. The gear I carry in the fire service is usually lighter. I honestly had some back soreness after carrying that monstrosity around all night on our spring weekend shift.
Continue reading ‘Why is our jump kit so heavy?’
