You can be sued for anything, whether your right or wrong. You can not and should not be held liable for entering an enviroment you are not trained or equiped adiquately for. I look at it like any other hazardous situation....you need the appropriate training and equipment. And you need a risk assessment.
Would you be liable if you refused to go into a hazmat enviroment with out appropriate haz mat gear?
Would you be liable if you refused to repell down a cliff to a pt, if you had no training to repell, and did not have a harness or helmet?
Then why are you held liable if you are not tactically trained, tacticaly protected, and tactically equiped going into a potentially tactical enviroment? A duty to act is not a duty to be stupid.
I had an hour discussion on this very topic with my last EMT-B class I taught.
Here is what you have to keep in mind...you do not only place your self at risk. You place EVERONE at risk. Do you think other medics are going to just let you die if you go down, or officers, no we are going to come after you ..and get shot ourselves. It is far better to do the long established practice of staging on high risk calls.
Life is like a coin, you can spend it anywaay you like, but you can only spend it once. You may (most likely may not) save a single life by sacrificing yours, but how many lives could you have saved through your everyday non herioc actions if you had lived?
I have many fire department friends, but we have this debate constantly. Being herioc doesnt keep you from dying, often uselessly. Case in point: The recent death of Lt. Brenda Cowen. (you can find a lot of information about her death here:
http://www.hultgren.org/memorial/b.cowan/index.html
As a new LT on an ALS engine company, she led her crew into a KNOWN hostile situation a domestic with a subject shot (there was some debate as to if they knew this or not, but last I heard dispatch taped indicated they did know)..they saw a female in the front yard, pulled up and were sniped. She died, another crew member was shot and I believe medically retired. The crew, and the responding ambulance crew were pinned down for a long time until they could be extricated by SWAT.
Now I am sorry for her death, I really am, Lexington is my home town. By all acounts she was a remarkable woman. But one moment of disregarding common sense because of a fire department typical mentality, killed her, took a career from one of her friends (whose life she was responsible for) , put other police and EMS workers in grave risk to save her, and traumatized her whole department, and her family. For a patient who was already dead. In short she died uselessly. We should learn from her mistakes.
We dont just have a duty to act, we have a duty to act responsibly.
