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My sister lives in St. Pete, and I have a friend that works as a paramedic for Sun Star. I honestly don't know much about the system though.....

They need to shadow both. There are aspects of medicine that they will learn from each provider that the other can't teach them. Sit a few shifts with a triage nurse, and you start to understand the method behind their madness. When you are bringing a patient in, this will come in handy...

Asthma is primarily a problem with ventilation, not oxygenation. It's not until late in the acute illness that hypoxia becomes a problem. By that point, the patient is well behind the 8 ball.

And why shouldn't we be doing data entry? If it can be done at the same time, what's the problem? Good data entry means quicker billing, which is how many of our jobs are justified. I switched from EMS Charts to Zoll Charting. OMG. Best thing we ever did. Our chart lock times dropped...

Less side effects when you use lower doses. And you get the benefits of both agents, like sedation, pain management, reduction of MAP (if you want it).

I think an agency that lets patients be bagged for 45-120 minutes is doing their patients a huge disservice. It can be difficult, often downright impossible, to manage the finer points of mechanical ventilation with a BVM: fine tuning FiO2, RR, TV, PEEP, PS, mode, I time, etc. You need a...

I'm actually quite lucky. We have our standard protocols, and our IFT critical care transport protocols. Both actually REQUIRE an intubated patient to receive sedation and analgesia unless specifically contraindicated. One of the nice things is that once the patient is under our care, the...

You hit the nail on the head.

Yes, I think there is. These patients are coming from a facility with medically trained staff. Some nurse, somewhere, called a doctor to get permission to send the patient out. These are licensed providers who are being paid, often quite well, to provide care to people who can't do it...

I guess what irritates me the most is when other providers (nurse, mid-level, physician, RT, take your pick) feel that they know more than me about my scope of practice, my training and education, and what I should be doing. Every field has their stellar providers, their miserable people, and...

I don't know if you have a state final, or if you just do NREMT-P, but you will be grateful when you get to your certifying exam that your class final was a bear. You will be able to walk out of the certifying exam saying "Wow, did I miss something? That wasn't bad at all." My paramedic...

What are you in, junior high? You missed the point of my post. Grow up.

While a migraine isn't a petty problem by any means (I get them myself), we are discovering in medicine that opiates for headaches without skull fractures or ICH are one of the worst things we can do. Patients bounce back and end up needing large doses of narcotics. Most physicians in my area...

I just don't like the way the term is used. Someone corrects someone else's grammar, and they get called a Nazi. It may be accepted, but I don't have to like it. Agree.

Right. I try to make a polite post; you resort to name calling. Classy. A few spelling errors aren't my main problem. People constantly mixing up (and not taking the time to make sure they are right) there, their and they're, or your and you're, or to, too and two are what makes me grind me...

He's not being a Nazi, as he's not commiting crimes against humanity. What he's doing is pointing out the irony of commenting on incompetence and professionalism while making grammar errors that are very easily fixable. I feel the need to comment. Rob (I'm assuming that's your name), you...

I trained in the EMS system about 70 miles west of where I currently work FT. We had 1 preceptor, and with rare exception, 2, for our entire duration of field time. Some students needed 2 due to work schedules. I started with 1, but he was the most senior paramedic at his service, and took a...

^^^This^^^

I thought it was going to be a song about taking a bath.

What I said was that delaying transport, or justifying the delay of an ambulance so that you can do stuff like start an IV and board and collar (which doesn't take me 5 minutes) is bad medicine. BLS crews don't start IVs. ALS crews do. Is the BLS crew an ambulance or first response? If...