getting cought out by time

[emt_irl]

ok so recently i had a transport for a guy who fell down some stairs,the paramedics and myself(emt) on scene took full spinal precautions and boarded the guy. all went well and done to the letter of the law. my only problem was time was against me for filling out the paper work on him as the emergency room was only 5-8 minutes away from our location and our patient care reports are huge. so i got all the important stuff down and his hx and my clinical findings and some baseline vitals just as im filling out the next section we arrive and the driver opens up the back doors. i asked for a few minutes to complete the form and berfore i knew it we were rolling him into the hospital, done a hand over assisted the recieving doc get him onto a trolly and got him to sign the end of the report for handover.

drove back to base and the medic took the report to check it over for me and called me in to the room and had a good ''chat'' with me about the papwer work. My defence was all the important stuff was was filled out bar the tiny little section that has time depart scene and time arrive at hospital (i think there for national statisics) now i will put my hand up and admit i should have written them down but in the heat of the moment i didnt have a watch and wasnt going to take my phone out infront of the patient and his family to record the time.

does anyone else feel really pushed for time in the back of the ambulance to get everything done in a real short space of time, i suppiose im just writing all this out to clear my own mind but id like to hear your experences and has it happened to you before?

ive learned my lesson and next time i will make sure i have a watch to write down the times.

**edit** just adding something extra here the first aid/responce crew that attended him there before we got to him never got a hx to hand over to us, so i had to start from scratch.

 

[feldy]

you should be able to contact dispatch and ask them for time of pt. contact, depart scene and arrival at facility given that you report those to dispatch

 

[emt_irl]

was unable to get those details before we departed the scene. and by the time we got back we only had our carbon copy of the form so i cant edit that to include the details after

 

[feldy]

documentation (in any industry) is important, it may not seem like a big deal, but it establishes a time line and covers your a** so you dont get sued. Thats probablly the reason why your medic was a little hard on you, becuase the medic is your superior and any mistake made on your end, he is directly responsible for.

 

[emt_irl]

yeah i can see now why he may have been a bit hard on me, sure i know better for next time now... never forget a watch or ask the driver to drive to the other hospiatl further away(joke)

 

[WolfmanHarris]

Unless it's a long transport I do little to no documentation en route. I take notes in my note pad as we go but otherwise I don't open the laptop until we get to the hospital. After I've triaged I go out to the reporting room and work on it at one of the desks there while my partner watches the pt. Until we have a bed assignment. If I want to closely monitor the pt I may work on the report in emerg, but not usually as our reporting room is where the couch, printer and comfy-ish chairs are.

If our pt. happens to be serious then I offload, give report and then do the ACR while my partner cleans the truck and bed.

A service that wants you back on the road so quickly that you can't complete documentation properly is shooting itself in the foot for an eventual lawsuit. The fact is pt.'s complain; my service has a complaint rate of 0.7/1000 calls (and a complement rate of 1.6/1000 calls) and some of those will lead to lawyers. The only way to effectively deal with a frivolous lawsuit is to have the documentation to prove it.

 

[Outbac1]

For most of the medics I know emerg calls get charted after the call. Transfers get a mix of before, during and after the call. If people are that concerned about getting the paperwork as you hand over a pt, I'll finish it there. Then I'll move on to the next call.

 

[busmonkey]

In my opinion there is no reason to stress over little details like that. I am an EMR and therefore, the lowest of the low and what does that mean: I get all the paperwork. If the carbon copy has been handed in, I usually write it onto my copy and make a note that it was not on the carbon copy. If I feel like I might get into trouble I might even go to the length of just calling the hospital and informing them of the missing info on the report. All in all, patient contact time and depart time are details that are meant to be there (in my mind at least) for the legality side of things, in case things go sour, so if it is on your copy of the report, and there is a note stating the lack of time attached to the report you should be fine.