Job Stability in EMS

Let’s just get it out of the way. As a Basic EMT, and to a slightly lesser but still very similar extent as a Paramedic, you are typically viewed as unskilled rank-and-file. You are more like the kid flipping burgers at Burger King than a nurse or a doctor. This is a consequence of supply vs. demand, low barriers to entry in this business, and minimal labor and political representation. I don’t think it’s right, but it is the way it is.

(Note: those working for fire departments and other public services may find that this information does not apply. If that describes you, I applaud you for your good fortune. But for the thousands employed with private services, read on.)

This is a difficult and personal subject for me. The start of my career was a rocky one; there were various factors, but in the end, the one overarching reason was that I didn’t understand how to be the kind of EMT that employers wanted. The lessons that follow may not apply everywhere, but based on my experiences with numerous companies in two different geographical areas, they are generally more true than not, and if you’re newly entering this industry in a field position, they’re worth holding close to your heart.

First, understand that, as we noted, you are not a high-value employee. In fact, you are essentially a low-wage service worker, and you are largely interchangeable with anyone who holds the same certification. Moreover, the job market is currently Bad, and even when it was better, there were people out there who would do this job for free; in other words, even though demand for your skills is still reasonable, supply is very high. Although your service needs a certain number of EMTs and/or paramedics, and although they may perform some amount of screening or testing to find the best candidates (better employers will do more of this), as a general rule there is a limitless supply of people standing behind you, all holding the same card. And your company is just as willing to pay them instead of you.

Second, your employer is in the business of making money. Just like BK needs someone to flip their burgers, ambulance companies need someone to drive and tech their ambulances, so you are a necessary part of their business model. But you are far from unique or irreplaceable. Since it’s not very difficult to hire an EMT, it’s never very difficult to fire one and hire another. So if you ever become more trouble to keep around than you’re worth, you’re inching towards termination.

Third, and most importantly, the money is in the money. A principled and respectable private service will try to drive their financial success through clinical excellence, but whether they do or not, their financial success remains the bottom line. Your Lifepaks and MDTs may or may not get upgraded, but the marketing and PR is never in question. So if by your actions, inaction, or even by association you’re ever involved with something that jeopardizes your company’s revenue stream, you’re absolutely begging them to reconsider taking their chances on a fresh hire.

So, do you want to keep this job, be it briefly or for a long career? (Whether you should be taking advice from me is a fair question, but at least you’re hearing it from experience at the wrong end of every error.) Job stability in this field depends on three skills, and you don’t need them all. Pick any two and you’ll do okay. You might even sneak by with just one. But when the day comes that you don’t have any to protect you, your days are numbered.

 

1. Protect the Money

You can kill patients, break equipment, curse like a sailor, and drive rigs off cliffs, but if you can avoid impacting your employer’s bottom line, you’ll probably be fine.

Billing is big. Try your hardest to help generate billable runs, because getting paid for your calls is how money is made, and consistently interfering with this will bring you the wrong sort of attention. Whatever documentation hoops they ask you to jump through, as long as they’re not unethical or detrimental to patient care, just do it.

Furthermore, your company’s continued existence is predicated on maintaining certain contracts that it holds with cities, counties, hospitals, and other facilities. These contracts give your company the right to transport some or all of their patients, and that can mean many calls and many dollars per year. If you look unprofessional to someone important, piss off a staff member, or make a clinical error that comes to the wrong person’s attention, you are making the Powers That Be at that organization wonder if they shouldn’t be handing their patients and dollars to a different ambulance company. And that is numero uno on the list of ways to lose your job. Don’t think that the facts will save you, and don’t think that they’ll be reasonable or go to bat for you, because if being able to say “the people responsible have been terminated” is good for business, then nothing else will matter.

Play the game. If you’re asked to wash the truck with a toothbrush, wear a tie and a monocle, and give all of your patients free backrubs, just do it. Play the game, or someone else will.

 

2. Be Liked

They never taught you this in school (and school was where you’d have found many of us just before we became EMTs), but if the right people like you, nearly anything is possible. If not…

You don’t have to be universally popular, but you should not be “that guy,” because when push comes to shove, somebody with an office and a salary is going to have to decide whether you should keep working here, and if they never liked you to begin with you’re not going to have any armor.

Here’s the big, big secret. You may think that life should be fair, or at least employment should, and if you do your job and don’t screw up too big, there’s no grounds to fire you. In other jobs, you might be right. But we just saw that you hold no sway in these parts, cowboy. Moreover, in most places you were hired under a contract that included the words “at will,” which means they can get rid of you for no reason at all. (Wholly legal? Maybe, maybe not, but most of us won’t be bringing any lawsuits, because it’s a lot of trouble and being “the dude who sued” is not great for your future employability.) So here’s the way it really works: they can terminate anyone, or they can keep anyone. It all depends on what they want to do.

If you’re well-liked by the people who have a say, then you can screw up, and it will be water under the bridge. It may be documented and recorded, or it may simply be swept aside, but nothing will come of it. On the other hand, if you’re someone they’d rather no longer worked there, then you don’t even need to screw up to find your way to the chopping block. Because the fact is, nobody is perfect; even if you think you’re a company man, in the 40+ hours you punch each week, they can find a violation here, an error there, a complaint, a concern. If you ever start getting called to the deck for driving 26 in a 25 MPH zone or parting your hair left instead of right, update your resume, because this is known as “building a paper trail.” (If you’re lucky, maybe they have no problem with you yet, and they’re just preparing a case for the future. Some places are optimistic like that.)

 

3. Stay Under the Radar

This is the master key of maintaining your employment. Many people lack one or both of the previous virtues, but still keep their job for 10 years because they’ve got this one down pat.

If you’re hired today, and starting tomorrow nobody ever hears your name again, then your job is safe. Your name has to cross someone’s desk before they can tie you a noose. So if you’re ever going to screw up, just make sure that it’s never in a way that draws attention.

EMS is rife with uniformed men and women who show up, clock in, work their hours, and go home. They may be interesting people or boring ones, smart or dumb, up-and-coming or cheerfully stagnant. They may be loved or hated by their coworkers. They may even give bad care, write bad documentation, and draw ire in every ED they enter. But so long as it’s never the kind of thing to make anybody complain to the supervisors, then they’ll do just fine.

On the flip side, they might be a Super EMT, aces in every category, but if their name and face are constantly attracting the eye of the bosses, then they’re at best one or two steps from seeking new employment. Because being a bother is not a good virtue if you’re not valuable.

Truth be told, if you’re wise, then you’ll probably stay off the radar even for the most harmless reasons. No attention is good attention, not even asking to change a shift or replace a shirt, and while some of that is obviously necessary it should certainly be minimized. It’s a fine, fine art you’ve mastered when you’re hired as a new medic, and five years later nobody upstairs knows you beyond a vague sense that might work there.

 

There you have it. The big three.

You will notice that nowhere in the above list do I include clinical competence. For a long time, I believed that if you were a good EMT, that was enough to keep you safe — and if you were an exceptional EMT, that would even make up for a few things. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Possibly in a few cases, such as if you assist with training and continuing education, your knowledge and skills can be a feather in your cap. But as a rule, nobody in charge knows or cares about how good you are. You’re just one of the many EMT-Bs or EMT-Ps from the big group of identical licenses on the payroll. So if you think that being the fastest intubator in the West will protect you from violations of the Big Three, then you are sadly mistaken.

Indeed, this is yet another reason (you know, beyond the basic moral ones) to treat your patients and facility staff with respect and compassion. By and large, they don’t know if you’re any good at medicine — the patient in particular — but they know if you were a dickhead, and dickheads are the people they call and complain about. You can nearly kill someone, but if you smile, hand them a warmed blanket, and shake their hand, they’ll go away thinking you were the nicest young man they ever met. For all the great ideas on kindness and empathy in our favorite EMS book, Thom Dick’s People Care, it’s worth noting that its subtitle is not “How to Get into Heaven,” but “Career-friendly Practices for Professional Caregivers.” Career-friendly indeed.

It may sound like I’ve become a terrible cynic, but in truth, I think I’ve just come to understand the basic realities of the field we work in. We may wish the world were different, but we may also wish for a pet unicorn and world peace; things are the way they are, and the truth is that you should be able to maintain a long and successful career, providing the most outstanding care you can offer, if you simply learn how to stay employable.

Treat the Patient?

We’re taking a short break from our series on transfers to discuss a recent post on the EMT-Medical Student blog. One of the issues he brought up is the old saw, “Treat the patient, not the machine.” Rogue Medic struck on this as well.

What do people mean when they say this? They mean that if you attach a diagnostic tool like a pulse oximeter, and it gives you a result that is at odds with the rest of your assessment, then it is probably wrong, and you should not base your decisions on it. It can be broadened to the BLS level, including findings like vital signs, by saying: “Treat the patient, not the number.”

And it’s essentially true. In fact, something I frequently harp on is that diagnosis must always be based on a broad constellation of consistent findings, not on any one red flag. We like red flags, we want red flags, because they’re easy, but it never works that way. The body is an interdependent system, and if a pathology is present, then it almost always has multiple effects detectable in multiple places.

This idea can be looked at differently by asking another question: is it possible to be severely, acutely sick without showing it? I don’t mean long-term problems like cancer; you can’t look at someone and detect that. But if someone’s dying in front of you, of a proximate cause like hypoxia, is it always obvious based on their presentation?

Generally the answer is yes. That’s why it’s wrongheaded to look at a healthy patient with pink skin, normal respiratory rate, calmly denying shortness of breath, but with a low oxygen saturation, and say, “Oh no — he’s hypoxic!” If your oximeter says 72%, what’s more likely — that the number is wrong, or that the patient is somehow hypoxic without any other evidence of it?

Call this the phenomenon of the Hidden Killer. Is it common? Is it real?

It is not common. But it is real. And that’s what’s not recognized when people say, “Treat the patient…”

Why do we take 12-lead ECGs on chest pain patients? Because a clinical assessment alone cannot reliably detect ST elevation, which (simplifying the issue!) is diagnostic for a heart attack.

Why do we take CT scans of blunt head injury patients? Because a clinical assessment alone cannot reliably detect intracranial hemorrhage.

Why do we perform abdominal ultrasounds in multi-system trauma patients? Because a clinical assessment alone cannot reliably detect abdominal bleeding.

Now, some critics will say that all of these will indeed present with obvious, frank clinical findings. The major STEMI patient will eventually enter cardiogenic shock. The head bleed will become comatose and present with Cushing’s Triad and herniation. The abdominal hemorrhage will have guarding, distension, and eventually outright shock.

All true enough. But we’d like to find them earlier than that. It’s true that severe and late pathologies are usually obvious, but our job is to find them when they can still be treated, not after their effects are permanent or lethal. Heck, we could also just provide no medical care and wait until everyone died to make a diagnosis, which would extremely easy to assess, but a little pointless. It is rare that big problems do not have a big assessment footprint, but “small” problems can still be a big deal.

Consider the much-maligned pulse ox. Surely it does not replace a full assessment. But when used appropriately and its role understood, it provides valuable information. A drop from 99% to 94% saturation may not be clinically obvious, but it is potentially significant and surely worth knowing about. What about the patient who is non-verbal at his baseline? Is he going to complain if he drops from 95% to 87%? Will it be frankly obvious from his skin and breathing? Maybe, maybe not. (How about if he’s on a mechanical ventilator at a fixed rate?) If not obvious, does that mean it’s no big deal?

Is the pulse ox always correct? No. But like all things except magic, it’s wrong in predictable ways, ways that can be accounted for, and when it is wrong, that can tell you something too. It requires adequate peripheral circulation, and poor perfusion will make it read low. How is the patient’s distal perfusion? Pink and warm? Good capillary refill? Then you’re probably okay. Carbon monoxide poisoning will make the sat read high. Has the patient been in enclosed spaces with heaters or open flames? Working around engines? Is there any potential source of CO in their history? If not, you’re probably okay. Alternately, does their sat read unusually high compared to their clinical presentation? You might then consider carbon monoxide — something you might not have otherwise have known without the oximeter. It didn’t give you a correct number, but by knowing how and when it fails, it gave us a useful answer.

Here’s a recent example. I picked up a patient with a blood pressure of 54/4. That is a ridiculous blood pressure; arguably, nobody should have it, on the theory that a pressure that low should be pretty close to unobtainable. But, there it was. We diverted to the nearest hospital and I was subsequently chewed out by the receiving nurse.

Do I think that patient truly had a central arterial pressure of 54/4? Nah. Although she wasn’t doing well, her skin was better than that, and although she was altered and combative, she wasn’t comatose. However, her pressure was undoubtedly low, and just how low? If I don’t go with this number, then I’ve got no guidance. The clinical picture was clouded. I couldn’t ask if she knew what day it was; I couldn’t ask what her complaints were; she was non-verbal. She was tachycardic and hypoxic and diaphoretic; she was certainly sick. So, treat the patient, or treat the number? The number may not have been right, but it was concerning enough that it couldn’t be ignored without an assessment that otherwise screamed “no problems here!”, which was not what we had.

Treat the patient? We always treat the patient. A hands-on physical and history is a vital, vital tool for assessment, but other tools are also useful. Some people lament the downfall of the traditional clinical assessment, from the days when doctors with fingers like pianists made diagnoses from findings like Ewart’s sign, and it is shame, but the reason that the high-tech tools like imaging and labs have become de rigueur is that they work well — they diagnose many problems with a speed, sensitivity, and reliability that is not otherwise possible. Nobody would ever say, “Treat the patient, not the unstable cervical spine fracture,” because we recognize that’s the sort of thing you may not otherwise notice until it’s too late. That’s why we spend big bucks on CT scanners.

It all matters. It’s all useful. We should neither cast aside our individual numbers nor ignore the bigger picture. Data is something that, like money and sex, you can never have too much of.

The Tough Ones

People can be pills.

That is, EMS is the business of dealing with people. Even at their best, some homo sapiens will not be your favorite; you’d have to be a saint to love every single person you’ve ever met. And unfortunately, the patients we’re handed in this job are rarely at their best. That’s why they’re in an ambulance. Expecting someone to present a winning smile while they’re dying may be unreasonable.

The trouble is that showing compassion and doing your very best for people is a lot easier when you like them. It’s just human nature; we’re always nicer to the people we identify with, get along with, and find affable and likable.

. . . a lot of ordinary people look totally uncool, especially in their BVDs. In fact, they’re pretty ugly without their clothes on, or at least a little make-up. Some of them are fairly dim bulbs, actually. And on the worst days of their lives, a lot more have BO, bad breath, wrinkles, loose skin, irregular teeth, big bellies, short penises, hair where there shouldn’t be hair, and no hair where there should be. They’re inarticulate, clumsy and, well, kind of ordinary. They don’t match any of those pictures of perfectly proportioned people you’ve seen in your textbooks or on TV.

And guess what? Their families love them dearly, just the way they are!

. . . What you are is a caregiver. What you’re not is a judge. . . . You can be one or the other, but you can’t be both — not at the same time, anyway. As a caregiver, you can’t let yourself slip into the trap of judging people you don’t know anything about, because it does bad things to you. (People Care, 16)

See, the tough thing is that although it’s very human to treat the likable people better, that’s not how this job works. You’re allowed to like whomever you want; that’s your right as a person. But your responsibility as a caregiver is to do your best for all of them, like or loathe. It’s a learned skill, because it’s not at all natural. But it helps if you remember that your standards for likability are far from the ultimate test of someone’s personal worth. Everyone’s fighting their own battles, and patients shouldn’t be expected to look pretty for you in the midst of theirs. You’re not here to add to their burdens.

We have a built-in bias that tells us that people who are smelly or fat or dumb are overall bad people. It’s hard to overcome it. And because people who are choking, or incontinent, or hospitalized tend to be especially rough around the edges, it’s very easy indeed to file them under the category of “unpleasant objects.”

Special mention should be given to patients who are, to put it simply, jerks. Even those of us who can look past physical and mental defects may have trouble treating the world’s biggest asshole like our own dear mother. Once again, we have to remember that we’re not playing this game on a personal level, and the question isn’t whether the patient will be invited to our birthday party. The question’s whether they deserve our best care — and whether or not that’s difficult, whether or not we want to give it, the answer is “yes.” That’s how this works. If they’re a patient, they get our best. Some nasty physical ailments are harder to treat than others; some personalities are likewise harder to tolerate. But we don’t get to pick and choose, so we just have to suck it up and be compassionate professionals across the board.

Try to develop the mindset that to be human carries an inherent sacredness, value, and dignity. And that even the most despicable and worn-out creature on your stretcher has the same needs and feelings, and likely the same sense of self-worth, as any CEO or socialite. To quote Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, “I have no right to say or do anything that diminishes a man in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him, but what he thinks of himself. Hurting a man in his dignity is a crime.” (From How to Win Friends and Influence People, 214.)

All of this isn’t easy. Striving toward it is a constant effort. But if you can take a patient who you truly loathe, and treat him just the same as you would your own child — or your partner — or yourself — then that’s something to celebrate. Because quite frankly, the patient is somebody’s child, or somebody’s partner, and odds are good that their opinions of his human worth may differ from yours.

. . . until the curtain was rung down on the last act of the drama (and it might have no last act!) he wished the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks not to be jeered at; perhaps they might turn out to be the heroes of the play. (George Santayana on William James [from Linda Simon’s William James Remembered])

Patient Advocacy

What does it mean to be a patient advocate?

I first learned this term from my original EMT textbook, and since then, it seems like it’s been the favorite buzzword of the medical profession. It’s a little bit like “leveraging synergies”; it sounds surely good while having no clear meaning at all.

I think this is a shame, because to me, patient advocacy is actually a very meaningful concept, and in EMS, a very important one. Perhaps this isn’t true for doctors and nurses, radiologists and cath technicians — although I’d like to think it is — but on the ambulance, it’s more than just a pretty ideal.

This was what the textbook had to say:

As an EMT-B, you are there for your patient. You are an advocate, the person who speaks up for your patient and pleads his cause. It is your responsibility to address the patient’s needs and to bring any of his concerns to the attention of the hospital staff. You will have developed a rapport with the patient during your brief but very important time together, a rapport that gives you an understanding of his condition and needs. As an advocate, you will do your best to transmit this knowledge in order to help the patient continue through the EMS and hospital system. In your role as an advocate you may perform a task as important as reporting information that will enable the hospital staff to save the patient’s life — or as simple as making sure a relative of the patient is notified. Acts that may seem minor to you may often provide major comfort to your patient. (Limmer 11)

Not half bad, really. But raise your hand if your eyes glossed over that paragraph.

You see, as a prehospital provider, you occupy a unique role in a patient’s course of care. Your time with this patient, from initial contact until transfer of care, is one of the only periods when they’ll have the one-on-one, undivided attention of a healthcare provider. Think about that for a moment. Ms. Smith may previously be, or soon will be, under the auspices of a veritable pantheon of specialists — cardiologists, endocrinologists, orthopedists, neurologists, and more. On this occasion alone, she might pass through the hands of an ED physician who stabilizes her, an internist who admits her, a surgeon who operates on her — never mind a supporting battalion of nurses, techs, CNAs, therapists, and witch doctors. It takes an army to treat a patient.

But that army has other responsibilities, too. That ED doc has two dozen other patients screaming for his attention, most of whom have already been waiting for hours. The internist is running a code in the next bed. Those nurses are overworked, underpaid, and really want to get home.

As a rule, they all have the best intentions, and they all want to look out for the patient. True bad apples or apathetic mercenaries are a rarity in this business. But everyone’s simply spread thin. Even when they have the resources to give their undivided attention to an individual patient, it’s rarely their responsibility to do so. The cardiologist is here to provide a consultation on Ms. Smith’s heart — not to champion her care like the Hospitalist Prince of North 6 and butt into everyone’s else’s work. It’s just not his job.

But what about you, the humble stretcher monkey who brings her in? For that brief period of time, you really have no business except Ms. Smith’s well being. That’s why you’re here; that’s what you were dispatched to look after; and it’s your legal, medical, and moral responsibility to do everything you can for her, until such time as you transfer that responsibility into the aforementioned healthcare cloud (or she refuses further care). Assuredly, you have a defined scope of practice, and company policies to follow, but we’re not talking about cutting out her gallbladder or taking her to a dive bar. We’re talking about — say it with me — patient advocacy. And everyone upstairs agrees that’s part of your job.

Your job is to be her champion. Not because you’re Superman. But because she’s so vulnerable right now, she doesn’t need Superman; she just needs anyone who will step up. Anybody who’ll stand there and say, you are not alone. We all need that, and we all deserve it — but many of these patients, after countless years and battles, have no one else to turn to.

Let’s steal a quote — this is from Danielle E. Sucher at Legal Agility, responding to the question of why she practices criminal defense.

I don’t like hurting people. Is that so hard to understand? When I go to bed at night, I can sleep easily, knowing that I fought for freedom, and for less suffering rather than more. That I stood by someone accused so that he would not have to stand alone.

I can’t know whether anyone is truly guilty or innocent, or what they deserve, and frankly, I don’t care. We all deserve at least one person on the damn planet willing to stand there next to us and fight on our behalf.

[Source]

Patients have problems. You can’t help with all of them. You can’t cure their cancer, or pay their bills, or make the world fair and right. But you can do an awful damned lot, because it’s astonishing how large the gap is between what the patient would do and what they can do in their current, largely powerless position.

You have resources. One’s this big ambulance, and everything in it. But you also have the resource of knowledge: you know how the system works. You know where to go for certain things, you know who to contact to get what you need, and you know what’s available for the asking. These would serve you very well if you should need to visit the emergency room or become hospitalized, or if your mother should, or your child. If Ms. Smith were your mother, you wouldn’t just shuffle through the process of putting Person A into Slot B, ignoring her needs and looking for ways to avoid going the extra mile; you’d fight like hell to keep her as happy, as comfortable, and as looked-after as possible. Because patients can’t fight for themselves, any better than defendants can argue their own cases. And because although other professionals will be involved in this process, they won’t be fighting for the patient either. I have immense respect for the docs and the nurses, but sometimes, you’re standing in a place to do things they can’t. A few of them may go above and beyond, but they all have their jobs to do, and this isn’t it.

But it is yours.

People Care

This is the best book any EMT can own.

I say that as someone with a strong clinical focus, and a passion for improving and elevating the educational standards in our field. I am an avowed nerd, and drip rates, T-wave inversions, and case reviews are what keep me awake at night. Yet I consistently recommend this little “warm and fuzzy” booklet to new and experienced EMS professionals alike, and would place it before any electrocardiographic tome or trauma manual. It should be on the shelf of everybody who works on an ambulance, period.

Thom Dick is a longtime paramedic, as well as an author and speaker on the EMS circuit, and several years ago he collected many of his favorite topics into People Care: Career-Friendly Practices for Professional Caregivers. This is a paperback book of less than 100 pages, written in a personal and accessible style, and it compellingly lays out Thom’s idea of what this job is all about.

It’s not about job skills, or tips for getting through your shift, although some of these are offered. Rather, it’s really about how to understand your job — what lens you should use to view this whole EMS business. This may not seem especially important; after all, no matter what rose-tinted goggles you buckle on, you’re still going to end up bringing the same patients to the same places in the same ways (and making the same dollars for doing it). True enough. But what about you? Will you be happy doing it? Passionate? Driven? If you start out as those things, will you stay that way, or will you join the ranks of the angry, the apathetic, the disillusioned?

There are a lot of things wrong with this job. Depending on who you ask, and what their priorities are, you might get different lists. But certainly, EMS is an industry with flaws, and the men and women working to improve it should be seen as heroes. But even if things do get better, what will we do in the mean time? Hell, even after they get better, will you be happy? The goggles you wear can turn the best circumstances bad if that’s your attitude.

Thom’s work is the prescription. When we talked about Joe Delaney, I was channeling People Care; Thom’s kind of EMT is someone who views their business as helping the people who call for us, and who asks for no more than that (or less). It’s not a complicated outlook, but I think it is utterly, absolutely essential.

A lot of things are wrong with this job, but if you have the right lifeline, you can survive all of it and more. Thom’s been teaching these ideas for years now, and you might be surprised at how many of your colleagues and coworkers know him personally or have heard him speak. But if, like me, you haven’t been so fortunate, buy his book. Read it. Recommend it. Loan it out — it’s been out of print for years now. And see if it doesn’t bring some of your problems into perspective.

(I am indebted to Peter Canning for originally introducing me to this book, via his blog, Street Watch. Also of note: Steve Whitehead at The EMT Spot is an old coworker of Thom’s, and his site discusses many of these topics in a similar spirit.)