CGambill

The book is Prehospital Emergency Care, 8th edition, the class is Emergency Medical Technician.

This week I studied about communication, documentation, and medication. The chapters were relatively short, which was nice given how long they were the last two weeks. Here is the first installment.

Communication
Communication is an import, ongoing part of an EMT’s job. Whether it is communicating with dispatch, the hospital, with other EMS units, your partner, or your patient, you are always needing to communicate. The most common device used for communication is the portable hand-held radio. The radio itself doesn’t have a very long transmission range on its own, but through the use of repeaters, devices that rebroadcast low power signals into higher powered signals, it becomes a very powerful too.

When heading out to a call, communication first starts with dispatch. Dispatch notifies appropriate personnel about the emergency, which includes but is not limited to: where the call is at, what it’s for, and the time of the call. The responding units acknowledge the information they have received, and let dispatch know when they’ve arrived on scene. If additional help is required, this is also communicated through dispatch. When you leave the scene, when you arrive at the hospital (if you are transporting patients), and when you are clear and available for a new call are also communicated to dispatch.

Dispatch, however, is not the only source that you communicate with. Communication with medical personnel is also needed if you are transferring a patient, or even if you aren’t. As an EMT, there are very few drugs that we can give to a patient without first getting permission from medical direction. Information about the patient must be relayed in order for medical direction to make their decision. That information is:

From pages 335-336

• Your units identification and its level of service (BLS or ALS)
• The patient’s age and sex
• The patient’s chief complaint
• A brief, pertinent history of the present illness, including scene assessment and mechanism of injury
• Major past illnesses
• The patient’s mental status
• The patient’s baseline vital signs
• Pertinent findings of your physical exam
• Description of the emergency medical care you (and others) administered
• The patient’s response to the emergency medical care
• Request for further actions/interventions at the receiving facility
• Estimated time of arrival

The same information, sans request for further action, is also relayed to the receiving facility when you begin to transport your patient.

You will also need to communicate with other people on scene. If there are EMS units or medical personnel on scene, you may need to be able to locate who is in charge to see how you can help. If your patient is alert and oriented, you will also need to be able to communicate with him to find out what is wrong and to gain his consent for you to help him. In some patients, this may be difficult. Foreigners, children, elderly and deaf patients are such examples where helping them may be difficult.

As you can see, communication is required in many different facets in the EMS system.

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Next week I’ll be talking about respiratory emergencies, cardiac emergencies, and altered mental status and diabetes emergencies.

Mistovich, Joseph J., and Keith J. Karren. Prehospital Emergency Care. 8th ed.
      Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2008. Print.

I love learning about other cultures. One of the cultures I like to delve into is Japan. Sometimes, however, I step a little further into the Japanese culture than I would like. Last week, for example, I found myself looking through the pages on Ebay for a bento box. For those who don’t know, it is basically a Japanese lunch box. Except they don’t just put their food into little plastic bags and then throw them into the lunch box. Oh no, they prepare their meals into aesthetically pleasing arrangements. Some even go so far as to make an art out of creating bento. Here is one of the more average bentos that I have found.

http://eavam.seesaa.net/

How nice is that? Since I take lunch and dinner with me to school, I thought it would be nice to have an authentic Japanese bento box with food prepared in the authentic Japanese bento box way. I had to figure out how to create such beasts without needing to put too much effort into it. Naturally, this would lead me to my next find: wiener shapers. Yes, in Japan, they have developed plastic molds to cut your hot dogs into cute animals and shapes. Here in America, we have animal crackers and goldfish to torment. In Japan, you get animal shaped hot dogs. How cool is that? They even have molds to shape your hard-boiled eggs.

http://item.rakuten.co.jp/st-toremu/200442/

This was, of course, until I realized that I was too lazy for all of this, even with the cut outs. Ah well, at least I still have my little red lunch pail.