I'm with Cory, completely. It's risk/benefit, plain and simple. I positively abhor the culture of danger that pervades EMS and oftentimes Fire, but there is a difference between thinking danger is "cool" and knowing that you are entering a potentially dangerous situation with the purpose of saving a life.
To put it bluntly, my impression of the vast majority of medical personnel that I have met in real life who have insisted that they would *never* stop for something, is that they do EMS because they think it makes them look cool. I'm not saying that is true of anyone here; however, in my personal experience, that's the nature of it.
Doctors, generally speaking, and again in my own anecdotal experience, don't stop for a number of reasons. Oftentimes they don't notice, sometimes they don't care. Sometimes they're just scared by situations without controlled environments. But above all, they are afraid of being sued for malpractice. You aren't covered by institutional insurance if you aren't working. Furthermore, how many doctors do you know that would actually know what to do in a true emergency as it unfolds in front of them? I know plenty of docs - even ER docs - that I wouldn't want doing pre-hospital care on me. There is a fundamental difference between hospital and ER care, surgery, and pre-hospital care. The best trauma surgeon in the world is just an over-glorified nurse without his OR, and he quite possibly does not have the experience in the field that a paramedic does, either.
Let's be honest: if you keep your brain about you, how much of a risk are you taking by stopping? Park your vehicle upstream of the crash; put on your hazards; keep your lights on; point your wheels away from the crash. Don't stand in the middle of the road. Pay attention to your surroundings. Scene safety isn't just about what it's like when you arrive; it's about maintaining situational awareness constantly. If you do that, you'll see the car coming long before it has a chance to hit you.
Human beings have a remarkable ability to inflate the unlikely but grotesque and ignore the commonplace but benign. How many people are afraid of flying? How many are afraid of driving? And yet which kills more people?
Maintaining scene safety is critical, and you need to know when to cut your losses and run. But we must be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater: a little risk to save a savable life is, like it or not, the nature of the game. Anyone who says otherwise - anyone who claims to keep themselves 100% out of risk by only entering a "100% safe scene" - is either lying to themselves, or has never set foot in a vehicle.
25% of firefighter line-of-duty deaths occur in an apparatus. EMS is no different. The risk you take by stopping off-duty is the same you take every day when you go to work, for the same purpose. It's calculated risk management, and REALISTIC risk assessment, that should dictate whether or not you stop, and not some set-in-stone personal rule. And what if you were the driver of that car? What would you have me do?
