Rubberneckers, Lookie Loos, and other Civilian Interference Stories

WolfmanHarris said:
Did you ID yourself to the crew as a moonlighting Medic (or EMT-A)?

If it were me and you had I would have let you stay out of professional courtesy, but otherwise I would have asked you to stay out and just been sure to give you a quick run down before we left. That's what I do with PD (unless they're coming along), as well as foremans, security, teachers, etc. I don't mean shut them out as a snub, but I wouldn't want to be in the patient's shoes in a box that full.
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No, it was the three (two medics and the EMT-A) and then me standing at the side door.

I asked them if I was in their way and if they'd like me to leave as I know that it can be very annoying. They said it was completely fine, though. It didn't feel right to me.
 
We actually had Provincial Rounds on Monday covering a call involving a Physician on scene. Bear in mind, our Rounds are conducted by Physicians. Until the provincial takeover of EMS, it was primarily conducted by our Medical Director.

The Physician brought up the subject of Physicians on scene and even admitted that he would not be much use above the EMS crews' level. As far as what can be done on scene with equipment available etc, a Physician cannot do any more than the crew that is responding.

They can, however, assist the crew on scene. Also, if a Physician is willing to take pt care and attend all the way to the receiving, then they can have full control of the scene.

So, if a physician takes pt care from the crew, is it ethically responsible for them to hand down care to a lower training level? If so, then what use is it to have them in charge of the scene? They don't have the equipment necessary to do any interventions that my partner and I aren't capable of doing ourselves.
 
On scene, MVA car vs. travel trailer. Car driver, a young woman, impaled by a strip of fiberglass ripped from the sportscar she was in. WHILE I'm doing triage on passenger side (her husband with cervical fx), a passerby drunk leans in driver's window, sees the shard and PULLS IT OUT!

By the will of something other than me, they BOTH survived!
 
firetender said:
On scene, MVA car vs. travel trailer. Car driver, a young woman, impaled by a strip of fiberglass ripped from the sportscar she was in. WHILE I'm doing triage on passenger side (her husband with cervical fx), a passerby drunk leans in driver's window, sees the shard and PULLS IT OUT!

By the will of something other than me, they BOTH survived!
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I hope the idiot was arrested, charged and convicted. Assault and battery would be appropriate.
 
Funny you should mention that! Not ONCE did I even think of pursuing the guy. Sometimes, things like that happen as if a Devil were sent out of the ethers to ruin your best work. It's almost not even about the AGENT. But, looking back I can see I worked on keeping my focus on what I could do, rather than what was in the way. I'll never know if -- had she died -- I would have pressed to have the guy reamed.
 
Me Being a Lookie Loo well really just trying to help

Played lookie lue a few times, First time was last year first time I took the class. I was going through a parking lot and a female on a bicycle darted out in front of me I clipped her. I immediately jumped out and assisted. I put her back down on her back on a elevated side walk thing because she stood up did basic assessment for a trauma PT. Vitals were great ha a small abrasion on her left ankle. a nurse showed up out of the starbucks so I turned care over to her. Cop said no ones fault on private property good to go don't bother with insurance. Me being a dumbass didn't. the nice female turned out to be just 18 and her mommy tried to sue me! Due to my awesome insurance agency and some good photography of the scene she was DENIED!

Second time was recently on while I was in my refresher course. Driving up to my moms house in rural Calaveres County saw a car on side of the road MVA through a POWER POLE! So I drove up a qaurter mile turned into the ditch and drove up to her. Cleared power lines, She was ok 85 Y/O lucky women! After I sat her on my tail gate and got vitals and took over c spine, We chated. A double bypass a pace maker 2 heart attacks a stroke now this and she is still alive and well. The nicest most humble person i have personally met. All she could do is complain of what a hassle she was and I just insured her she was not a hassle and she could be seriously injured not know. Finnaly after 15 min Medics showed up and police and fire, I transfered care. They said I did an awesome job and the women loved me, I even went back to the vehicle for her purse just cause I wanted to help and couldn't do much more
 
sdaileyemt said:
After I sat her on my tail gate and got vitals and took over c spine
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You walked her to your truck, climbed her up onto the tailgate then took cspine precautions?

She must have been up and walking already, because I can't imagine that an EMT would knowingly manipulate someone out of a vehicle with that MOI without cspine already in place :D
 
yes, someone had already pulled her out of the car. And my truck isn't high its a 05 ford escape suv the back is about 3 feet off the ground if that maybe 4. But I did take c-spine as I was walking her, Just because MOI I mean she was doing about 50-60 and went through a power poll into a ditch. No I would NEVER remove a PT like that from vehicle unfortunately I was not first on scene. Sorry i am bad at story telling :P
 
Correct me if i am wrong, but isn't any movement aside from placing the patient on a backboard contraindicated for suspected spinal injuries? Being that you walked her to your truck, whether she had a C collar on or not, I would say that pretty much completely nulls the purpose of the backboard in the first place, and is a not good.
 
My favorite helpful bystander story is about a frequent flier. We've run a number of assault, drug ODs, trauma calls on this guy for many years. We get toned out to 'unconscious male/head injury'. We find the guy passed out in his own vomit on the living room floor. The whole family is there, camped out in chairs around the living room, watching. The guy is alert to pain only. No visible sign of trauma anywhere. I ask the family what happened and get the litany of "He's a good boy. He's been sober for the past 3 weeks, going to meetings, he's not drinking!" Again, I ask, so what happened tonight? I get a long story about how yesterday he fell down outside and they took him to the ER, the ER assumed that he was just drunk and sent him home with what was obviously an undiagnosed head injury from yesterday's fall, because look at him... and he was staggering and having some other cognitive issues related to that 'serious undiagnosed head injury' from his ground level fall the day before. Guy's vitals are all wnl. No sign of trauma anywhere. But the family is very insistant that he go in to get his 'head injury' treated.

By now the guy is waking up a bit. His sister, who has been telling us how clean and sober her brother is, steps over to the pt and says to us... "It's Okay, I've had first aid training at work! I know what to do" and grabs him by the shirt front. Lifts him up with one hand and round house slaps him across the face twice! His head goes flying with each slap. I yelled "Stop That!!!" and said... "I don't know where you learned that as a skill for dealing with a potential head/c-spine injury, but I am documenting what you did in my report in case it just turned him into a quadraplegic." She started crying and saying we didn't care, we were just like the ER, we were treating him like he was drunk instead of injured... yadayada... turns out the guy had a Blood Alcohol about 4 times the legal limit and a body full of all kinds of recreational chemicals. Oh yeah.. and no trauma.
 
I had a pt. with end-stage cancer who was experiencing moderate hemorrhage from a decubitus ulcer. The pt. was obviously in a lot of pain and needed to be transported for sutures/evaluation.

The pt.'s spouse was interfering with care, to the point of being a hindrance. He was attempting to administer high doses of narcotic analgesics with EMS on scene. Obviously, not a great thing to do, especially since we were planning to administer our own analgesics.. Then the spourse attempted to move me out of the way to move the pt. himself while loaded on a "Mega-Mover". After asking, then telling the spouse to move out of the way so EMS and fire could move the pt., the spouse became irate. He refuse to disclose the pt.'s medical history or medications, and would not retrieve medical records for us to examine. Told EMS & fire to "go to hell" and could not understand why we wanted such information. My partner was called a "jerk" and much worse for refusing to allow the spouse to administer morphine and dilaudid with EMS on scene, and for asking simple questions about the pt.'s medical history. With that, we exited the house with the pt. and transported her to the ER. She was upset with what had happened, obviously embarrassed, and in a great deal of pain from terminal cancer. Treated with fentanyl en route to the hospital. That call was just frustrating through and through.
 
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BossyCow said:
Oh yeah.. and no trauma.
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Really? How do you explain the two red marks across the face? :P

Sounds like an EMS technique one might find on Trauma. :rolleyes: "Don't you die on me... <SLAP> <SLAP>!!!"
 
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Dumb**s public....

HokieEMT said:
My dad has too many of the same story. There is a reason he won't eat at Double T Diner(local place), Golden Corral, and many other buffet styles places. He has even had ones where the pts friends pick up what the pt was eating and eat it.
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Try working EMS in a Casino. Typical scenario: 72 y/o woman unconcious on the floor, we start the assessment and ask the other Casino patrons to move to make room. Most common response I used to hear "...but I'm winning...."

Another one that is fun is any half-decent medical at a heavy-crowd special event. All of a sudden, we're far more interesting than whatever it was the crowd paid to watch.

I got so fed up being bumped and bothered one time that I actually yelled at a security supervisor and a cop who were watching us to "Give me a f***ing perimiter and protect it!". That was out of character for me- I'm usually really easy-going.

After the call, my partner looked over at me she notices I'm was still pissed about it. What good are cops and security if they are lookey-loo's too?
 
Mountain Res-Q said:
Really? How do you explain the two red marks across the face? :P

Sounds like an EMS technique one might find on Trauma. :rolleyes: "Don't you die on me... <SLAP> <SLAP>!!!"
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Oh crap, you mean thats not the way to deal with drunks:excl:


B)
 
Scottpre said:
Try working EMS in a Casino. Typical scenario: 72 y/o woman unconcious on the floor, we start the assessment and ask the other Casino patrons to move to make room. Most common response I used to hear "...but I'm winning...."
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Been there, done that lol. When I first got my EMT-B, I worked privately for a casino while PRN at another service awaiting a full-time position and *HATED* it. Most of the "calls" were where patrons would sit 10-20 hours in front of a slot machine, their sugar would bottom out, and down they go. Had a few that would bump another patron on their way down and as soon as we show up, the patron 'bumped' will still be playing their machine while yelling that they want the first (unconscious) patient removed for disturbing their play.
 
I do love walking into a nursing home room and seeing a nurse doing compressions on an air bed and and aide using a BVM without holding it to the patients face... got so bad at one nursing home we offered to do their CPR class for one dollar a participant... they turned it down.
 
Scottpre said:
Another one that is fun is any half-decent medical at a heavy-crowd special event. All of a sudden, we're far more interesting than whatever it was the crowd paid to watch.

I got so fed up being bumped and bothered one time that I actually yelled at a security supervisor and a cop who were watching us to "Give me a f***ing perimiter and protect it!". That was out of character for me- I'm usually really easy-going.
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At two places I work that do event standby, we actually have several people attached to a crew whose sole job is to clear a path and keep us from interference while we assess and move patients. Security may or may not be there, and they're sometimes really helpful, but we don't count on them.

At the third, our event standbys are pretty tame. When you ask bystanders to clear off, they do. But we always have a ton of staff in attendance anyways, and if anything were to go wrong, we'd have a lot of support very quickly.
 
Had an incident recently. Responded to an MVA, 1 motorcyclist down in the roadway. Arrived on scene. Pt. lying supine in the road, motorcycle into the guardrail. When we went to remove the Pt.'s helmit for backboard purposes the whole group of people on motorcycles freaked out screaming what are you doing you can't take the helmit off. I tried to assure them that we were trained to remove helmits and we knew what we were doing. That didn't work. Luckily one of the Pt.'s fellow riders is an EMT instructor and assured them that it was ok and we wouldn't be able to assess and treat the Pt. properly without taking it off. (It also helped that we had an off duty Paramedic Supervisor there to set the crowd straight ;-) ).

Also before anyone goes too crazy, this was a Class II pt. with obvious elbow fracture, pain 10/10, object impaled in lower leg and had so much protective clothing on we couldn't get the C-Collar on without removing the helmit. That is why we did it. No airway compromise.
 
trevor1189 said:
Also before anyone goes too crazy, this was a Class II pt. with obvious elbow fracture, pain 10/10, object impaled in lower leg and had so much protective clothing on we couldn't get the C-Collar on without removing the helmit. That is why we did it. No airway compromise.
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Wasn't going to get crazy. We remove helmets as a matter of course here. I'd imagine a crew would need a damn good reason not to bring a true trauma pt. in who wasn't damn near naked.
 
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