No longer will you ask your patient what kind of heart surgery they had upon seeing that sternotomy scar from an incision made before they saw through the length of your sternum and then reconnect it with wires after they’re done. If you haven’t already, you will have the patient that denies any heart problems [...]
The trauma triad of death is made up of hypothermia, coagulopathy, and acidosis. And when it comes to hemorrhagic shock that will occur unless we intervene as quickly as possible. If possible, we want to interrupt the development of the triad be addressing the individual parts as quickly as possible. Hypothermia occurs in cases of [...]
The life you save may not be the patient you’re treating. A head trauma patient may not be as lucky as Phineas P Gage. If you’re not familiar with his story, briefly he had a pointed iron rod 1 ¼ inches in diameter and 3 feet 7 inches log enter under his left eye and [...]
Reminder, the scenario and questions that were asked of a group of paramedic students: You are called to the home of a 24-year-old female who is 36 weeks pregnant and in labor. You are met at the door and advised that she has had no prenatal care. You are also told that the patient has been [...]
Crew Resource Management (CRM) is a team-oriented approach for the effective use of personnel to promote the teamwork, communication, and problem-solving to patient safety. CRM originated in the commercial airline industry because there were numerous errors because of breaks in communication amongst the crew members in the 1980’s and has since been expanded into dynamic, high-stress [...]
I can never remember the term when I need it, so I thought I would write a blog about the condition to try and correct that. Dextrocardia occurs when the heart is in the right side of the chest and the apex points to the right instead of the left. This condition was discovered in the [...]
As an industry we love to throw out numbers, the most repetitive being 500 mL. We hear that number several times over the course of our initial training courses. And I do not know about the other DistanceCME (DCME) faculty, but I feel like I mention 500 mL at least once a week, and usually more. [...]
In an interesting turn of events the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced on Jan. 13, late Friday afternoon, that it is looking into a link between the COVID-19 vaccination and ischemic strokes in the older adult population, those over the age of 65. This report comes as [...]
This year is quickly becoming the opioid/EMS negligence year. What happened to the good ol’ days of news involving emergency medical services (EMS) was always something positive? Where did we go off the rails? The latest story involves both fentanyl and negligence. Veronica MacArthur has filed a lawsuit against Hermon Volunteer Rescue & First Aid Squad [...]
