Recent content by medichopeful

I never really understood this whole concern about walking people to the stretcher if they’re safe to do so. Patients walk in the hospital all the time, why should we be any different?

Why such an argumentative, demeaning tone?

Of course there are situations where I'm off duty where some of the same situations apply. However, off-duty I have no duty to respond, don't deal with sick people who may be altered, don't stop on the side of the highway, don't go into random houses, and don't interact with random people in...

^This, 100% He is also really lucky that he didn't get slapped with a charge of false-imprisonment, or whatever it is that NC calls it.

When I'm off-duty, I concealed carry. I'm all for concealed carry, and have no issue with people doing it. On-duty as a paramedic, there's no way that I would want to concealed carry. The risk is too high, it now adds a weapon to every encounter, and it also adds in concern for close-quarters...

As presented, I would have done a BGL and if that was normal, I would DSI him. Combative, in and out of consciousness, pulling at tubes/lines, and initially hypoxic post head-injury with coarse lung sounds like a pretty reasonable intubation to me. He's going to almost certainly be intubated...

Me neither. I'll absolutely try pain meds followed by sedation, but if that doesn't work I have a pretty low threshold to paralyze. For really sick respiratory patients, a lot of the time I'll just go straight to a sedative/analgesic/paralytic combo to just completely take them out of the...

I think someone already mentioned it, but with the ReVel if the patient is taking in huge volumes it can fool the machine. With patients that are taking stupidly large breaths (neurogenic, metabolic acidosis, etc) I'll usually just switch it to AC/PC. Patients seem to like it a lot better. In...

Yeah, I’m curious about this. I’m honestly surprised the state even cares enough to investigate this. There’s something odd here.

Ahh. So the less time they have to spend with the patient, the happier they are.

My money is on the BP not being accurate. Like others have said, I would try the forearm. I've seen an NIBP get a SBP in the 40s on a bedrail, so sometimes you have to evaluate the accuracy of them. It's important to clinically correlate vitals and clinical presentation, and it doesn't really...

I believe that Silver is referring to nurses in non-specialty areas.

I'm confused by this as well.

I think calling for ALS would have been a good idea for pain management. There are going to be many times that BLS will get on scene and find something that ALS is needed for, but were not dispatched to. I'd also keep in mind that just because the hospital is 10 minutes away, doesn't mean that...

At least twice a month. One is generally education based (case reviews, guest lecturers, etc). The other is more operations, program updates, etc. This doesn't include clinical days, special project meetings, cadaver or skills labs, etc, which are in addition to the twice-monthly meetings...