Inappropriate, unprepared and "just wrong" students.

[mycrofft]

Tell us about students who were "just not right" to be in class.
Let me start it off with some I've encountered doing volunteer training in the past eight months:
1. Of course, the ever-popular folks who do not speak fluent English and, despite the statements in the registration packet and at the beginning of class, don't ask for an interpreter, and consequently cannot pas the written exam.
2. The young lady who texts during CPR class (six student class), and cannot do compressons because she had anterior thoracic cosmetic surgery last week (in her words, "b@@b job", and no, I didn't look).
3. Female CPR students wearing very low cut tops, short skirts, etc.
4. The male student who came wearing a Coffeehouse Press T shirt featuring a 1/2 life size color photo of his topless alleged girlfriend.
5. The male student wearing a t shirt emblazoned with a glossary of gangsta colloquialisms involving sex, drugs, and jail.
6. Long dangling necklaces (both genders) that drag back and forth across a CPR mannikin as they go from compressions to inflatons and back again.
7. Difficulty getting a seal for rescue breathing secondary to relatively new and large lip piercing.

We were able to ultimately surmount these issues and get the job done; all exhibited that they were capable of the skills and eventually passed the written test. No other students protested. Extra time was necessary for some, especially the language challenged students, to get over the hurdle.

So, any other stories? Were your students "worth it"? Did they finally meet class objectives?

PS: As my wife observed, emergencies are often "come as you are", so folks maybe ought to come as they are to class, too.

PPS: Since they could not have the Red Cross study materials until the day of class and these were re-collected at the end of class, there are institutional issues as to class preparedness too).

 

[emtchick171]

Well in my instructor methodology class...there was a girl who had been warned and warned that when it came time for her to teach her "lesson" for grading that she must dress nice, talk loud, clear and plain, and could not chew gum.

---needless to say she smacked on chewing gum the entire time, wore jeans with one knee cut out and a halter top. She would have talked fine if it would not have been for the wad of gum in her mouth...but when she tried to talk everyone was so distracted with the gum they couldn't concentrate on the lesson. Looks like she's not going to be an instructor!

 

[Anjel]

I guess there have been students that have shown up for clinicals in jeans/hiphuggers and their uniform shirt untucked and were sent home.

Also our supervisor sent a guy home because he showed up with a pink spiked mohak that if he tried getting in the ambulance he would have to squish it down. It was like 1.5ft high. So he was sent home right a way.

I've never personally had an issue. Besides the fact that one school doesn't teach them BPs very well .

 

[ArcticKat]

I've had PCP students I precepted that couldn't tell the difference between a CVA and an AMI. I'd try to discuss the S/S of a heart attack and they'd spit out the S/S of a stroke. Multiple students did this so I called the school and told them to get their poop in a group because they're sending our incompetent students.

This school was also famous for failing students who made the school look bad, even if it was the school that was failing them in their education. I made it clear that it was not their students that were the problem, it was their instruction and if I ever heard of them failing any of these students for this I would have the school brought up before the Ministry of Health.

 

[exodus]

I've had PCP students I precepted that couldn't tell the difference between a CVA and an AMI. I'd try to discuss the S/S of a heart attack and they'd spit out the S/S of a stroke. Multiple students did this so I called the school and told them to get their poop in a group because they're sending our incompetent students.

This school was also famous for failing students who made the school look bad, even if it was the school that was failing them in their education. I made it clear that it was not their students that were the problem, it was their instruction and if I ever heard of them failing any of these students for this I would have the school brought up before the Ministry of Health.

Better than the ministry of magic ....owait THERE ISN'T ONE ANYMORE! BAHAHAHAH!

Sorry. And honestly, that's really scary... like... really. This is why there should be entrance exams to all of these >.<

 

[medicdan]

I've had plenty of "colorful" students... in different contexts...

Very unfortunately, we had to drop a student from our EMT class recently quite simply because she didn't have a good enough grasp of English. We had offered her all of the resources we had, and she hadn't taken us up on them... and it was clear based on her practical and written test scores we weren't "Reaching" her... a shame

I've had a student show up to a CPR class in a bikini, another in a kilt (both students had no trouble completing the class, incidentally).

I've had students try to cheat in some very creative ways, from reading the entire assessment scheme off of their hands and arms during a medical assessment (class practical final) to elaborate attempts to "work together" on an open notes, open textbook, open internet computer exam (the only thing that was closed was partners), copying off each other's exams during a HCP exam (also open everything except partners, and an EXTREMELY easy exam).

 

[mycrofft]

We had a mother-daughter pair of fire groupies at CERT training.

Always provocatively dressed and trolling for firemern. Fun to watch their heads turn when a firefighter walked past the clasroom, and when we went out on the training ground for the final, it was like "Hey, Sailor!".

Sometimes it seems students dress suggestively to affect trhe instructor, eithr to get passed, or just to rile them up.

 

[MedicBender]

I'm an FTO at my VFD for the new coming EMT-B students. Most of these students come from the county fire departments EMT-B training course. They use the Maryland Emergency Medical Services Systems (MIEMSS) EMT-B curriculum. It's a VERY watered down version of the national registry course.

One day I was precepting an EMT-B who had just passed his course. We had a call for a patient who began feeling nauseous after anesthesia at a dentist office. Once the laughing gas had been applied and the dentist placed the pick in the patients mouth the patient gagged. The dentist freaked out and called 911.

The call was pretty standard, not much happened and we ended up with a refusal. When we got back to the station I sat the student infront of the computer and told him to write the report and come get me when he was done.

literally 2 min later he finds me stating that he finished... I was a bit skeptical...

His report read...

"19 year old female was at dentist under anesthesia, dentist stuck an unknown object in patients mouth, patient gagged, doctor notified 911 of unusual response, patient refused care once EMS arrived"

We had to sit down for a while and review report writing. Turns out that in class his lesson on report writing was basically "write down what happened"

 

[Melclin]

Ah, mycrofft, creater of interesting threads. I never could find those workplace violence stats.


Inappropriate students are a real problem here. I suspect this is a fraction more serious than was intended for the thread, but the title raised my ire before I had a chance to absorb its lighter tone.

The grad attitude: According to the oldies, we have no work ethic, no life experience and no particular desire to remedy either of these issues. The other side of the argument is of course that the university trained paramedic is the future of the service and that narrow minded archaic old farts need to get with the times. The problem is though that they're onto something. Hyper-confident but inexperienced grads, as resistant to learning from those wizened fossils as they are keen to skive out of work while texting their friends about the weekend when they are planning to call in sick to go out and get pissed, are a real problem that the current system needs to address. The motto of this variety of grad is "P's get degrees" referring to the intial of the lowest passing grade at Australian unis, "P-Pass", in the same vein as the old joke, "What do you call a med student who know's 51% of what he should? Doctor".

Little nOObs: Even those grads that are studious, keen and willing to shut up and listen occasionally have another issue. They lack the life experience often needed for the 85% of the job that simply involves talking to people for one reason or another. Commanding authority at a major incident, comforting a family of the person hanging by their neck in the next room or talking a psych pt down from the mostly metaphorical (although sometimes literal) ledge, are difficult to do when your experience of the world is limited to season 2 of the OC and what your mates told you about that dead dog they once found on the railway. I've done all of those things in the past few months and I fancy myself as being pretty good at it considering I'm a 23 year old, upper middle class, privately educated, skinny white boy, but its still hard and much harder still for those who don't share my fortunate ability to empathise and communicate (not to mention my modesty, I'd hat to forget that h34r: ). It was a far less common problem when those entering the service were in their late 20's, on their second or third job and often had families, mortgages and lives.

Little girls: There seems to be a reasonable proportion of the student body that is made up of prissy, easy to tears, manicured 50lb blondes. The olds have complained that they may not be able to do the job from a physical point of view and the topic was the subject of a study into negative experiences of students on placements. If I remember correctly though, it is the same little girls who have a lower incidence of injury because they're not trying to lift their machismo as well as the pt. I do sympathise with this point of view a little though. There are way too many stories about female students having tantrums and bursting into tears when confronted with even constructive criticism. Its not so much a gender thing as it is a maturity thing. Similar problems pop up with blokes but its tends to be stories of stubborn defiance instead of tears, so they tend to be told with less viscous enthusiasm.

Maths whiz: A shocking amount of paramedics, many of them of younger variety, have trouble with drug calculations. This boggles the mind as drug calculations at their easiest are within the scope of a 2nd grader and at their hardest nothing that would furrow the brow of a dull middle school student. They are fundamentally important to paramedic practice, stupendously easy and life threateningly dangerous when f**ked up. Why it is a problem, I just don't know.

These are just observations and summaries of scuttlebutt, nothing more, to be taken with the same grain of salt with which they were written.

The biggest problem I observed with the universities, though, is that they accept people who, for whatever subtle reason of make or manner, in all likelihood will never be paramedics or at least, will never be paramedics of an acceptable standard. The first problem is that students can pass, if they are lucky, with a very low percentage of the required knowledge. Some in my class got to the end of third year and, when asked to discuss the subtleties of cardiac arrest in 3000 words or less, wrote barely legible essays on acute coronary syndrome, considering them both to be "heart attacks" (I kid you not). The unis are slowly fixing this problem. The second issue is that some people, be it because of a language barrier, a social barrier or some difficulty with diagnostic style problem solving, emotional intelligence, communication, driving or confidence simply will never make it as medics, even if they do scrape through with a pass. Its cruel of unis to let them go through thinking they might, but its also hard to come up with an objective criteria for people who can't hack it.

 

[mycrofft]

Mel, I have a ray of light onto some of that problem, maybe.

The organization I was teaching the most with told me this: the goal of this basic level training was to get trained people out there, not to try to winnow, seive, then filter them out. I was not to interfere with mode of dress unless it posed a safety hazard or was inflamatory (not offensive or distracting), meaning basically it had to advocate a breach of other students' civil rights. Language issues: I was relieved that they would try to facilitate their passage, because at that level they were not taking or relaying orders, and these students were motivated and caught on. My worst students were all native English/American speakers.

If the issue is volume, and the standard is believed to matriculate "OK" material, then they will continue to meet the standard, period.

How about the "Hermimone Granger" 's? Got all the answers, know where the class is going, and try to emerge as the leader? (I actually had a class where three other students told "Smarty" to "shut the f#$% up").

 

[jjesusfreak01]

His report read...

"19 year old female was at dentist under anesthesia, dentist stuck an unknown object in patients mouth, patient gagged, doctor notified 911 of unusual response, patient refused care once EMS arrived"

I like this. I wish we could write reports like this for ridiculous refusals.

 

[mycrofft]

How to teach the student...

"Gee, Wally, don't you think that report could be a little...misinterpreted?". E.G., some dentist might wind up being brought in for questioning.