On this most sacred of EMS holidays, I would like to give a shout-out to Boundtree Medical products, one of the companies my ambulance service uses for EMS supplies. You may remember them from the catalog they send out periodically, the one that weighs enough to give the mail carrier a hernia. That thing is […]

March 20th, 2014 was a big day for the EMS 2.0 movement. On that day, the EMS 2.0 Facebook Page received a message from not one, but two US EMS services asking the leaders of the EMS 2.0 movement to step in and “finally figure out what the heck we should be doing with those […]

“I guess they’ve been right this whole time” opined Chief Dave Schlemmer of the Neighboring Ambulance Service, “we really are a bunch of idiots.” In a small ceremony attended by various members of the media and numerous ambulance service members, the Neighboring Ambulance Service finally admitted that they are, in fact, “a bunch of idiots […]

If you’re interested in reading another case study regarding EMS treatment of an unusual episode of coughing and respiratory distress in a pediatric patient, click on over here: Pediatric Coughing Spell Could Be More Than Respiratory Distress – www.JEMS.com This article just happens to be the “Case of the Month” in the March 2014 issue […]

If you’ve been staying awake in your CPR classes for the last few years, you know that quality chest compressions and defibrillation are the only things proven to actually revive victims of cardiac arrest. Study after study has shown that any time not spent compressing the heart is time generally wasted on otherwise unproductive tasks. […]

Ambulance 34, Ambulance 34. 452 Smithfield Street for the 34 year old male with chest pain and difficulty breathing. Delta-Level response. Medic 72 will be your backup. Time out 14:35 Ambulance 34, a BLS level ambulance responds from their designated system-status management post to the residential neighborhood where the call came from. Upon their arrival […]

This letter came in from a medic in a part of the US the other day. I’m posting it with a few edits, but the message is very much intact. These are better words than I can type, and I’m glad she is putting this raw and poignant message out there. ———————————————————————— One of our […]

One of the perks of having the blog is that I get to promote good causes. Of course, I couldn’t possibly support all of the good causes that I get asked to support as it would quite literally take up all of my time, but every now and then I see something that I think […]

Push Hard. Push Fast. Don’t Stop. By now, every single healthcare person out there should know that in order to improve a victim of cardiac arrest’s chances of meaningful survival, chest compressions are where it’s at. Blood needs to keep circulating in order to keep a person’s heart and brain alive and functioning. High quality […]

It’s a little known fact that I can speak a little Spanish. I’m not very good at it, and I have a lot of trouble conjugating verbs into the past and future tenses, but I can carry on a fairly relevant conversation with most Spanish speaking individuals when the need arises. It always throws people […]