shortness of breath

[magicman]

Hi guys,
we get a lot of these at our FD and I just got my medical first responder certification and will be attending these calls when they come up.

just to clarify could someone give me a play by play of what we do when we arrive on scene. This is only to confirm and make sure I have all the steps down.

Thanks

 

[akflightmedic]

Scene safe?

BSI?

See patient in distress.

Call for ALS.

Apply high flow O2.

Take BP if you know how.

Gather medicines.

Have someone stand on porch to flag ambulance if densely populated area.

 

[JPINFV]

You great the patient, you assess the patient, you treat the patient, and you hand off the patient to the transporting crew. May I suggest that you try to do a ride along with your local EMS provider if your fire department doesn't have any sort of field training program for medical calls? Medicine isn't a simple check list that can be worked down.

 

[traumateam1]

Typically it would go down like this - according to the text books, but emergency medicine should never be recipe medicine! You will feel more confident after running a thousand SOB calls.

Scene Safe
BSI
ABC, Call for ALS back up/transport truck.. or hang tight until they arrive
Apply high flow O2

Then you'd start secondary.
History / Vitals
Documentation
Treatment.

Treatment in this case would be preventing respiratory failure or arrest and promoting recovery.

So what I mean by "recipe medicine" is that you don't have to wait to do your history until you are at that step. You can start right away, and you should. Start asking a million and one questions about whats going on, how longs its lasted, and cardiac history, etc etc etc.