Paramedic school never taught me how to respond when a gangster responds to you treating them with dignity and kindness by offering their services as a hit man.
Obsessed with our new cric kit.
Everything you need, nothing you don’t.
Love how it’s packaged with everything visable and in order for a Scalpel-Finger-Bougie cric.
Not to start a fight but I’m about to start a fight
I’m just an observer here but since moving to a sorta-in-hospital setting it sure seems that the more cringy nursey stickers and stuff you own the worse you are your job
Having someone you've never met trust you to take their baby, parent, or loved one from them during an emergency is the closest thing to sacred I've ever experienced.
It's an honor worth reflecting on sometimes.
US healthcare is a religion.
Paramedics, having taken a monastic vow of poverty in service of the sick and injured, are amongst the holiest of its clerics.
Come work with me!
We have an open medic position at my base
-Good medicine
-Really great high performing coworkers
-we do everything: RW, FW, and CCT ground
-Unique missions profile (ECMO to backcountry SAR calls)
-Colorado is rad
Getting gaslit by the ER staff because my stroke patient with their face melting off was actually just a TIA and had no defects by the time I got to the ER
Harm Reduction is to EMS as fire prevention is to the fire service.
We’re some of the only people in medicine that get 1-on-1 time with patients even after we’re done with what we need to do.
That last bit of time on the ride in is valuable, don’t let it go to waste.
Bubbles are such a pro move for pediatric 911 calls.
We know they chill out the kiddo but if you hand them to a parent you include them in their kids care, giving them some semblance of control back which chills them out—a chill parent makes for a chill kid.
I don’t know who needs to hear this but if they don’t respond to painful stimulus you’re done, you have the data you need.
You don’t need to keep hurting them harder or longer you can move on it’s going to be okay.
(This tweet sponsored by the anti-sternal rub club)
Wanna be a resuscitationist?
Cool, start learning how ALL of your equipment works. How to troubleshoot it, its limitations, and how to maximize it.
No excuses, be an expert in every piece of equipment you use.
So stoked to work for a program that takes our hearing seriously. New custom molded hearing protection now standard PPE for our whole program.
This absolutely should be industry standard.
I am so grateful to have come up as a paramedic in a system where we all wanted to run calls.
If you pissed if dispatch they sent you to the slowest posts and people would fight tooth and nail to get out if it.
Running calls is fun as hell just let me take care of sick people
With hyper-angulated VL we are taught things like the Kovsc’s Sign* or the 50/50 rule**.
w/ HAVL visualization of cords is rarely the issue, rather it’s tube delivery.
Simply, the worse your view, the more success you should find with tube delivery.
But why…?
🧵
I’ve been doing this since
@critconcepts
wrote about it in must have been 2014?
It’s incredible that I still get sideways looks when I do it.
I consider a BVM with airway adjuncts to be married.
They go together in sickness, that’s for sure.
Your first intubation attempt failed. You have to bag the patient back up before you go to plan B.
This is what your patient should look like...
It's far easier to bag when you've double-barreled their nose and placed an OPA.
#emergency
#emergencymedicine
#foam
#foamed
…
You know you’re in for a hard transport when the sending attending has the same UpToDate page pulled up in the background while giving report as you were reading on the way there
US Paramedicine doesn’t have a codified philosophical or theoretical framework.
It feels at times like it’s ad hoc because it IS ad hoc.
It’s easy to forget how young of a field it is, and how very recently people actually started to care about it.
Maybe they still don’t.
As a general rule, I don’t trust anyone who feels like they need to embroider the word “leader” onto their scrubs or wear a “leadership” badge buddy.
You are management, we the managed will determine if you’re a leader. You don’t get to just call yourself a leader.
My favorite thing about paramedics is how we all want to practice at the tops of our scope…
With the exception of foleys
They are in most of our scopes and yet are broadly ignored
I see a lot of unnecessary panic in the peri-intubation period surrounding a misunderstanding of SpO2, and specifically pulse-ox lag.
I was going to write a neat tweetorial but then I found this that’s both quicker and better than anything I could do:
A habit I have gotten in which I wish I had used more as a ground medic is making little “cheat sheets” on my way to calls. I have expected doses and volumes of any meds I might need (always RSI meds).
Peds I add normal vitals, equipment sizes (if you don’t use
@Handtevy
)
If you approach every low acuity call with the mindset of training for the high acuity patient, you will perform when it matters.
If you blow off the "BS calls" don't be surprised when you can't perform on the sick patient.
It's all practice and there's no substitute for reps
Difficult airway prediction tools don't have a place in EMS.
Either they need RSI/DSI or they don't. There's not some scenario where "well we'd tube them but since their mouth opening sucks..."
Approach every airway as you would a difficult one and you wont even miss LEMONS
Anyways, being prepared to respond to emergencies is cool.
But packing stuff to do "hero shit" but nothing to respond to the likely life-threats is misguided.
The basic stuff saves lives not the hero shit: BLS airway management, bleeding control, and a cell-phone.
No matter who you are or where you are this will always be a constant:
Bring a patient in to the ED on NIV who looks chill: ED will always take off the mask and then be shocked that the patient looked good because of the positive pressure.
Weird, we didn’t do it just for fun
Putting on a tourniquet:
“Hey man this is about to fucking suck, hopefully I’ll be able to give you something for the pain here in a minute but I can’t promise that right now”
Remembering the ENT resident who told my kid years ago that getting the inside of her nose cauterized for repeat epistaxis (nosebleeds) wouldn’t hurt
Y’all… be honest. Things we do hurt. They suck. They’re not fun. Don’t gaslight. Don’t fib.
Be trustworthy
I’d like to take a second to apologize to all the EM and crit care docs for the right sided EJs I placed in patients you probably wanted to line.
I didn’t know better then but now that I do know better I will probably still do it again, but only if I have to.
Since starting to fly I don’t feel like a “real paramedic” anymore (buy me a beer and I’ll tell you what that means to me).
While this job is profoundly difficult, it doesn’t use like 90% of the hardest skills of being a medic.
The “paramedic” stuff in HEMS is the easy stuff
As a paramedic I think I understand how hospitals works and then I learn that nurses at Level IV NICUs don’t all have to have NRP or STABLE and I realize I’m just a prehospital gremlin
🧵 We talk about the stress curve, we know that there is "optimal stress" where we perform best. Too little pressure, we get bored; too much stress we perform poorly.
We talk about this mostly in our personal practices. But as a flight medic I also apply this to groups.
Coming in with the unfiltered opinions none of you asked for:
Neonatal Resuscitation Program (NRP) should be required for all paramedics just like ACLS and PALS essentially are.
It’s not “PALS but smaller”. It’s a fundamentally different approach.
It blows my mind how ICUs (you know the place with all the intubated patients) sort sorta don’t use? ETCO2?
Like some patients seem to have to sometimes but by-and-large it’s not used.
Babes, it’s almost 2023. We’re living in the future.
Next time you get to the point in a code where someone gets bored enough to try to do bicarb:
Tel them to grab some graham crackers, crush them up and sprinkle them on the patient.
Since they wanna do something with no benefit because “it won’t hurt them”
(Bicarb does)
You can’t human factors or system design your way out of people needing baseline competence.
Systems that attempt to end up incredibly fragile and difficult to work within.
Remember most End Tidal Nasal Cannulas provide what is effectively only blow-by oxygenation maxing out around 8 lpm.
The prongs are for sampling not oxygen delivery and thus it is not appropriate for pre-oxygenation or ap-ox.
I made a gif to demonstrate:
After four days in a row of delivering a new Advanced Airway Course to my program all over Colorado I am EXHAUSTED!
So grateful to all the airway educators who have taught me how to teach these skills.
They showed me how to make this feel like playing more than learning!
Say it with me:
ETT cuffs don't need 10 ml of air! Use cuff manometry and aim for 20-30 cmH2O as a starting point.
This tweet sponsored by the 9ml of air I recently took out of a very uncomfortable patient's ETT cuff.
Holy fuck this is one of the most thoughtful, earnest, and true threads I’ve read on here in a long time.
Not just valuable for paramedics grappling with med schools but a great peak into the psyche of EMS for those that want to know how our weird little brains work.
I end up speaking to paramedic friends and collages every few months about doing medicine. Is it worth it? What’s the process like?
“Should I do it?”
And my answer is essentially these three things I’ve discovered and learned from others
1/ 🧵
The cool thing about flight suits is that they don't trigger the "I love a man in uniform" response but they also manage to let the cold knives of winter wind assault you but you'll also sweat more than you thought possible in summer.
Have we considered bottling whatever alleged magic is in a IV started in a hospital versus the field?
Maybe then they could just pour that elixir onto a field line instead of pulling it reflexively
The best medics I know consult base more than the rest.
They present the case, and present a plan or look for guidance of the best of two+ options or ask for creatively solving a problem outside of protocols.
The best docs collaborate.
The biggest thing that moving to HEMS has highlighted for me is that the medicine—the acute resuscitation of the critically ill—is the easy part of being a paramedic.
It’s everything else that is fucking hard. Dispo’s and the “maybe sick” patients are far more cognitively taxing
US EMS risk management follows the abstinence only model, with similar results.
We have to, as a profession, learn to accept and manage risk. It’s not enough to simply say “we just won’t accept any”
Photographic demonstration of the difference in safety culture between US and UK EMS from
@DrDougKupas
. The UK paramedics are the ones in green helmets, the US paramedics are the ones with no gear at all.
#NAMESP2024
If I get auto-peded due to Alabama’s hostile pedestrian infrastructure someone make sure the medic only gets a donut if he doesn’t goose the tube
#CCTMC24
Colorado:
In order to be “primary provider” on an air ambulance a Paramedic needs 3 years/4000 hours experience in an ER or ICU.
Considering the scope of most medics in ERs in Colorado, does this sound misguided to anyone else?
How did this end up as law?
@KurteL10
I tell my new partners that yeah, we have a fast helicopter, bags full of blood and other tools of resuscitation, but the most important thing we bring with us is that we “bring the calm”.
“Bring the calm” is almost like a mantra at this point
Also now that I’m a licensed paramedic we can all agree the the “certification vs. licensure” argument against paramedic pay has always been a dumb semantic argument.
“Nurses are licensed, paramedics are certified so how could we pay paramedics more”
You can, it’s all made up
I want to issue a formal shoutout to whoever it was at the Colorado EMS office who correctly decided that a Philosophy degree is “health sciences related” for the purpose of converting from a certified to a licensed paramedic.
On “Airway Monogomy”:
If you use a bougie whenever you’re using Standard Geo laryngosocopy, you will become so much more facile with it than if you only pull it out when you’ve already looked in an airway and got scared.
Start every airway like you would a difficult one.
“In summary, the bougie as an aid in the first intubation attempt was associated with increased success. These data suggest that bougie should probably be used first and not as a rescue device.”
I so badly want to be a cool FOAMed POCUS dude but I just simply don't work for a program that does it.
Also I'm not convinced the places doing it locally are doing it well.
If you’re in healthcare but you’ve never worked in the field maybe tonight is the night to keep your “hot takes” to yourself. This is the stuff that paramedics do best.
Good luck to the crew and ED staff out there. Thoughts with the family and the teams.
Small nuance but as one who spent years on twitter dot com banging the “paramedics are experts at Paramedicine” drum (before it was cool) I’ve shifted from the descriptive to the normative.
Paramedics *should* be experts in paramedicine.
It's funny how the people who are less good at this job inexplicably "hate these stupid QA flags".
And the people who are good at their job are willing to engage with the CQI process...
@jtrebach
Yo I once had to make the firefighters go get my patient because she tried to clean her urine off the floor with bleach and oopsie made chloramine gas.
So, yeah, don't do that either
@JamesHa43064357
@NAEMSP
@ACEPNow
I use the phrase Core Airway Skills rather than BLS Airway Skills.
They are the skills that will keep the pt alive.
And the reality is they’re not that basic; there are key microskills that must be mastered to ensure effective oxygenation and ventilation.
Woke up horrified because I had a nightmare that I flew a patient in to the ICU and when I tried to give report they were just like "nah you have to take care of them for the rest of your shift"
What is wrong with my brain
Very excited that we’re replacing the old buddy lite warmers with new QinFlow Warrior warmers.
These kick ass and keep the blood WARM even at very high transfusion rates.
Would love to hear any pearls or pitfalls from people currently using these!
Im a professional and I take my job seriously.
But also it’s amazing how effective a “mindset of play” can be at cultivating creative and effective solutions to problems in a resuscitation.
Bonus points for fostering high levels of team effectiveness.
Enjoy this progression of my mustache freezing while I got COLD in the National Ice Core Lab freezer!
I was a test subject looking at ALS trauma care in an arctic environment.
Bonus picture of why I am not MRI compatible right now
Denver-area medics should enroll!