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 [...]
It was announced by Emergent BioSolutions Inc. on Dec. 21, 2022, that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is going to review the potential classification of Narcan spray as an over-the-counter medication making it widely available as early as March 29th. This is great news considering that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) is reporting that [...]
Last week two emergency medical services (EMS) employees of Lifestar Ambulance Service in Springfield, Illinois, were charged with first-degree murder. Peter Cadigan and Pegy Finley, their certification levels were not disclosed in the article, were called by law enforcement to transport a man by the name if Earl Moore Jr., 35 years old, to St. Johns [...]
