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We do a lot of IFTs just because we are in the middle of nowhere with severe staff shortages at the hospital and no OR. So if someone's not doing well, guess who gets to slide on ice through the prairie to take them to a better-equipped hospital.:ph34r:

Sounds like a blast. All I got today was a test page. LOL. Of course, there's still hope for a 3 AM MVC that requires a 3-hour drive to the city complete with an intercept by STARS somewhere (yeah, right...in my dreams :wacko:).

We take the kid if we think s/he needs medical attention, even if parents refuse care. All the JW drama recently led to them saying parents cannot refuse care for their minor children. Not to mention, parents may be trying to cover up signs of abuse. If necessary, police can become involved in...

Could be hypoglycemia. Here they have medics (at least in the big cities) on duty who take vitals before people are dumped in jail, because people have died from hypoglycemia before since cops thought they were just drunk and violent.

My bad, didn't realize it's different elsewhere. Here if you DO decide to respond, you are not allowed to act as anything above a first aider (no matter if you're a paramedic or a neurosurgeon and no matter what kind of equipment you might happen to have on you), and if you do, you could...

Well, you ARE stationed in Mississippi...:P I used to live in the Gulfport area, by the way, and worked right in town.

We don't have anything, but I've heard of self-defense incidents where pretty serious damage to the patient resulted and it was simply documented and no charges were ever pressed (patients were biting, trying to strangle the practitioner with her stethoscope, etc), and the damage to the patient...

You don't have a duty to act unless you are in the very ambulance dispatched to that call. No one can make you perform EMS duties if you are not on EMS payroll at that very moment.

? Even EMRs (EMT-Bs) can do it here. Of course, that requires obvious signs of death or "injuries inconsistent with life" (decapitation, putrefaction, rigor mortis, and the like). I am not sure if EMTs (EMT-Is) can use other, less obvious signs, I'll ask my EMT-I partner at work.

What about auscultating the apical pulse? Gotta be able to hear that one for sure, if present, and the stethoscope would amplify the sounds of a weak pulse. It doesn't tell you anything about peripheral circulation, but it'll tell you whether to start CPR or not.

What do you dislike about it? I'm curious, since I have a friend who graduated from there, and I know a few people who are interested in becoming PCPs, so I've suggested the school to them. I'd hate to find out it's actually no good!

Woah, and I thought my $6,000 tuition was a lot...:wacko:

Hey Jh, Good to see you here. I would suggest looking into AB. Transferring between BC and other provinces for EMS personnel seems to be a rather complicated process - the scopes of practice are pretty wonky. Alberta has the most advanced scope of practice for our EMTs (PCPs) of all...

Hmm? I have no recollection of it, and my review instructor (who happens to be an ACP examiner and was there on the day of the butchering) specifically said that it's public info and we can all discuss it after the fact (and we did in the EMT class afterwards, with my EMT instructor who's also...

The full name is "Cushing's Triad," the endocrine thing is "Cushing's syndrome." So you took it the same weekend? Which scenario did you have? I talked to my classmates, some people had a drowning patient that just needed repeated suctioning and that's it, then another one had an unknown...

Maybe it's just an Alberta EMR thing? I have a buddy in BC who's a PCP/EMT, and we've discussed it with him before, but I don't know if he learned it at the EMR or EMT/PCP level. Anyway, Cushing's triad is a combination of bradycardia, very high BP, and Cheyne-Stokes respirations. It...

I passed the practical on the 1st attempt (they give us 2). It was a trauma with a lot of stuff going on and unconscious patient, but I knew how to manage everything. I think the only real catch was the Cushing's she developed as per 2nd set of vitals - a classmate of mine had this scenario and...

Our school has multiple exit points - altogether, I think we have 9 exams where you could get kicked out if you don't make a 75%, and there are other graded items where averaging below 75% would result in a failure. However, they let us do 1 retake for these 9 exams. We have a few people in my...