Helping

March 26, 2011 by 3 Comments

“He always said if there was any way he could help someone, he would.”

Carolyn Delaney

Not too many people know about Joe Delaney anymore.

He was a running back. Played for the Kansas City Chiefs, just a couple seasons — 1981 and ’82. Played high school and college ball before that, and ran track too. He was very good.

Delaney looked like he’d make a real mark in the NFL, but his career was short, and nowadays he’s been mostly forgotten. Sure, he held some long-standing records, but who hasn’t?

His claim to fame was something different.

One day in the summer of ’83, at a park in Monroe, Louisiana, three young children waded out too far into an artificial pond, floundered, and began to drown. Delaney, nearby, heard their cries for help. Although unable to swim, he immediately dove into the water to attempt a rescue.

The situation was chaotic, stories differ, and any definitive account of the events has been lost over the years. Whatever happened, the aftermath found Delaney drowned alongside two of the children; the third had made it to safety. One of the victims had eventually been rescued, but died at the hospital; the other was recovered by divers, DOA, along with Delaney himself.

 

This is an EMS website, and I’m not retelling this story as a teachable moment. As public safety professionals, we instinctively turn up our lip at Delaney’s actions. “Noble, but foolish,” we quip; becoming a victim, or a martyr, is no help to anyone. Perhaps the American Red Cross tells this same story in its lifeguarding courses to illustrate the importance of safe rescue methods. I’m certainly not recommending diving into pools if you can’t swim, or running into burning buildings without protection, or jumping out of planes without a parachute. This isn’t about heroism.

I want to use Joe Delaney’s example to illustrate something else.

“People ask me, ‘How could Joe have gone in that water the way he did?’ And I answer, ‘Why, he never gave it a second thought, because helping people was a conditioned reflex to Joe Delaney.’ ” (Sports Illustrated, 1)

He was fast, and he could handle a ball, but those weren’t the kind of stories people told about this rookie running back. Instead, they talked about how he “… mowed this woman’s lawn in the dead of Louisiana summer…” “… gave this person money to get through a bad stretch…” “… turned this child away from drugs…” And how every time, he did these things without question, without hesitation. Merely out of a basic, instinctive drive to help people.

 

Our job as EMTs is to stabilize. Treat and transport. Provide field assessment and triage. Activate appropriate resources. It’s medicine, or it’s public safety. Or something.

There’s a lot of somethings, and I’m not sure if I can remember them all the next time the tones drop. For sure I don’t think we’re getting paid enough to do ten different jobs.

But then there’s Joe Delaney.

“He always said if there was any way he could help someone, he would.”

Just that. If there was a way — any way — that he could help another human being, he would. That was only criterion. Simplicity itself.

What if that was the attitude we adopted? What if that was the job of the EMT?

 

The nice thing about wanting to help is that it’s pretty simple. When that’s all you want, you don’t need much more.

Joe Delaney was known for his thriftiness, for living simply even after going pro.

“Don’t you want nothing for yourself?” Carolyn would ask Joe.

“Nah,” he’d say. “You just take care of you and the girls.” (Sports Illustrated, 2)

And it’s funny. But when you view your job as helping your patients, in any way you can, a lot of other stuff seems to fall by the wayside. Is transporting this sort of patient your business? Do you really need to fluff this pillow? I don’t know; does it help? If it does, does anything else matter?

Naturally, there are things to consider. Because typically, the way we can help is through clinical intervention, through skilled medical assessment and treatment. If we helped in another way, they’d call us something else, like “plumbers” or “dentists.” And if we’re better at our craft, we can help more. That’s why we open the books and palpate the rubber mannekins. Because we recognize that if Joe did know how to swim, more lives might have been saved that day.

But the technical aspect is a means to an end, and just one means of many.

If you ask around the base, and people are truly honest, many will admit they got into this job at least partly from a desire to help people. It’s an organic urge, and a good one, and it brings us to the table, but then the years and the worries and the details of how and why and but… start to muddy the waters, and at some point we find ourselves forgetting that basic passion. Striving towards other goals. Elevating the details. And sometimes that’s okay.

But the next time we roll up those garage doors, maybe we can think back, and remember what matters. Maybe we can take a page from Joe Delaney, and every day assert this simple promise: if there’s any way we can help someone, we will.

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Good Partners

March 8, 2011 by 5 Comments

EMS today is almost invariably practiced in two-person teams.

The main exception to this is in the fire service, which — even when called in an EMS role — is often built up from crews of three or more. And on 911 calls in many areas, ambulances are routinely dispatched alongside the fire department and sometimes police or other resources, so it’s not unusual to see a half-dozen responders or more on a scene.

Nevertheless, this job is fundamentally one that you perform alongside one other person, and that environment defines how we live and work. In fact, the dynamic between you and your partner can come to resemble the relationship of a married couple, an observation made by many a poor spouse after realizing their significant other spends more time with a mustachioed paramedic than with them.

You spend upwards of 10 hours a day sitting in a small box with this individual, talking to them, listening to them, and sharing all their favorite habits, odors, and bodily noises. You experience the best of their personality, but also their worst, and you learn what they listen to, who they hate, and how they address and solve their problems. To do your respective jobs, you’ll have to find ways to compromise where you don’t agree, adhering to what you think is right but ultimately doing what’s necessary in order to get the task done.

We all hope to work with a good partner when we check the schedule, but what is it that makes for a good partner — how can we be that person to someone else? There are many qualities, and some (such as personality) are heavily subjective, but one I think is universal.

Good partners are reliable. This is a word that doesn’t get much respect nowadays — reliable is boring, 8-track tape and grayscale television, reliable is what your grandparents and Dick Van Dyke were. Certainly, although intellectually we acknowledge that it’s a good thing, “reliable” may not exactly be the byword we’d want on our EMS tombstones.

But reliability is a funny thing. Like good life insurance, it’s something nobody wants, but that we all want in the people around us.

Not everyone works this way, but I have a simple system when working on a dual-EMT crew. On any given call, one person drives, one person techs. If I’m the tech, I’m in charge of the call: I do all the history-taking and communicating with the patient; I give and receive the reports; I make the decisions about next steps and the course of care; I stay by the patient’s side from start to finish, and in the end I’ll write up the documentation. As for the driver, he obviously is responsible for driving, getting us from Point A to B and later to C, and related tasks like the radio; but most of all, his job is to help me out. Record vitals, retrieve equipment, start interventions, take heat — whatever is necessary to free me to do what I need to do.

It’s the job of the tech to keep the entire situation in perspective and paint the path that will, when viewed in retrospect, be clearly visible as the ideal course of care given the patient’s complaint. But many obstacles may interfere with that path, and the more that my partner can help clear those away without a hiccup or hesitation, the more smoothly things will go. This means doing what I ask without question, or better yet, anticipating it even before I ask; it means seeing and foreseeing problems and knowing how to pave them over without diverting us from our primary goals. I can be somewhat anal about this division of responsibility, not because I’m a control freak — I’m happy to play the other part when my turn comes — but because the best way to drop the ball and fumble through a run is by having two chiefs and no indians. Although there are times for collaborative discussion, and times to throw up your hands and refuse to do something foolish, the majority of actions and decisions on any given call are simply things that need to be performed by someone, rather than tabled for debate by committee.

Here’s where the issue of reliability comes in. As a crew, we have the potential to do some wonderful things, including pushing boundaries and getting creative in ways that are anything but boring. But in order for me to go out on a limb, I need to know that you are going to be able to back me up — cover your end of the show, pick up the slack and fend off any looming hazards. If I can’t rely on that, then I can’t extend myself, because I’ll need to hold something in reserve to pick up whatever you drop. If you don’t know how to get us to the hospital, then I may not be able to accomplish very much in the back, because I’ll need to divide myself between the patient and helping you navigate. If I need to ask questions, read meds, take vitals, and package the patient all at once, don’t be surprised if only half as much gets done, because I’ll be doing the work of two. I may be able to handle a rough call with the most useless partner in the world, but it’ll be done in the most bare-bones fashion, merely trying to get through it without any disasters and struggling to hold our heads above the standard of care. However, if you manage your end of things seamlessly and effectively, that frees me to step everything up; the more you can do, the more I can do. Reliability is boring if it’s all there is, but when it’s the immutable backdrop of your care, it’s actually the foundation for all creativity and excellence.

(Now, there are crews out there who don’t work this way. Instead, they handle things cooperatively, each member doing what needs to be done and nobody in charge. This works best when they’re very experienced and familiar with each other, in agreement on most decisions and practiced at staying mutually out from underfoot and functioning synergistically. This is not common. However, the important thing is that even on a crew like this, reliability is all the more important, because it has to run both ways — if we each have equal opportunity to drop the ball, then we each have to be absolutely reliable.)

There’s a major interpersonal element to all this, which is trust. Trust is the coin you pay back for reliability. I need to be able to trust my driver to do his job, and likewise he needs to be able to trust that I’m making smart decisions. If I’m sitting in back and tell him to hit the lights and divert to a nearer hospital, I need to be able to trust him to get us there safely and quickly, otherwise I’ll be forced to take time from the patient to monitor and direct him. But he also needs to trust that I’m making an intelligent decision based on a sound assessment, because he doesn’t know what’s going on back here either, and I may not have time to explain. How bizarre of a request can I make without him balking or refusing? That depends; how much does he trust me?

Just like in a personal relationship, the fear of lending this trust comes from a legitimate aversion to risk. Although trust in an intimate relationships puts us at risk of emotional harm, trust on this job places our career and the lives of our patients and ourselves on the line.

If I was wrong to trust my driver, he might get lost, panic, plow through an active intersection and kill us all. Of course, if he was wrong to trust me, our patient might receive the wrong care, die in a trauma room somewhere, and we’ll both be fired and stripped of our certifications. Extreme, but possible. In many jurisdictions including my own, both members of a crew are held equally responsible for all aspects of patient care; this fact alone makes trust tremendously important if we’re ever to divide up responsibilities at all.

For this reason, I feel that trust has to extend to before and after the call as well. Everyone has heard these rules, and everyone has broken them. “What happens on the truck, stays on the truck” is a popular one, mainly because we’ve all confided something to a partner only to hear them later repeat it to the wrong person — either innocently or seditiously. This sort of thing is fertile grounds for drama, which is no fun, but what’s key is that trust isn’t compartmentalized, and if you can’t trust your partner in a personal capacity, you won’t trust him professionally either.

I recommend these basic rules:

  1. Never relate any personal information told to you by your partner, unless you either request permission first, or “HIPAAfy” it so it can’t be linked to him (“one of my partners was telling me…”).
  2. Never tell any stories that could paint a past partner in a bad light, unless you either request permission or HIPAAfy it.
  3. Never involve supervisors or management staff in personal or operational problems, unless critical and intractable patient care issues are concerned.

These are pretty simple rules to understand, although harder to consistently apply, because we’re all blabbermouths at heart and don’t realize when something innocuous to us is private and personal to someone else. The gist is simply that there is a bond of trust between your partner and yourself, regardless of whether they’re a close friend, a hated enemy, or a total stranger; and that bond should not be violated except in extreme circumstances, generally involving the safety of yourself or others. Even in cases like that, every effort should be made to resolve the situation without violating their trust, which isn’t always the easiest method, but it is the best for everyone involved.

Again, this serves to reduce drama and maintain personal relationships, but we’re talking about it because it directly impacts your work. You must be able to trust your partner, or you will be a dysfunctional crew. (If I know you can’t be relied on, I can’t trust this blood pressure you took, can I?) Moreover, you will never be able to help your patients in any but the tightest, most minimal and conservative way, because you don’t know if anything else won’t come back to bite you. You’ll move through your day tense and fearful of being under the eye of someone you don’t trust. Bad news all around.

I’m not suggesting that these ideas are easy, because they aren’t, and dealing with their results and fallout is what makes up a lot of our daily troubles. But this is a team sport, and it can’t be done right any other way.

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How and Where? The Cornerstone of BLS

February 26, 2011 by 5 Comments

It’s common to observe, and not wholly off-base, that the EMT-B has only a limited toolbag at his disposal for the field treatment of his patients. There are literally only a fairly small number of interventions he is trained and permitted to perform, and most of those are for the trauma patient; for the typical medical patient, he can do very little unless they are actively trying to die. Now, it’s true that for those dying patients, he may have everything he really needs; BLS is the backbone of life support, no matter if you’re a doctor or a lay responder. Still, it’s easy to feel powerless as a Basic with the many distressed or ailing patients for whom we can do very little except transport them and set the stage for their eventual definitive care.

The first and largest clinical skill that the EMT needs to master is undoubtedly patient assessment, but if we’re talking about interventions — that is to say, actions you take that directly change the course of the patient’s care — I believe that limited or not, he has at least one very important role to play. The most important BLS intervention is decision-making.

No, we don’t push drugs or relieve pneumothoraces, but we still make decisions. These can be treatment-related, such as the decision to assist respirations or splint an extremity; they can be logistical and somewhat banal, such as how to best maneuver a stretcher into a home or where to park the ambulance. But with every single patient, we’ll repeatedly make one particular group of decisions — decisions which, at the least, will play some role in their care and eventual outcome, and at the most can determine whether they live or die. Foremost among these decisions are three:

  1. Where does this patient need transport to? What facility or point-of-entry will be most beneficial, given his presentation and suspected diagnosis? Would it be appropriate or acceptable for the patient to refuse transport?
  2. In what manner should this patient be transported? How quickly does he need to go? Is there no hurry, or does every second count? Do we need lights and sirens? Does the receiving facility staff need to be notified of special circumstances (such as trauma, stroke, or cardiac alerts)? After arriving, what information and what degree of urgency do you convey in your report?
  3. Would the patient benefit from any additional resources? You may be the only eyes and ears on scene; if fire or police are needed for safety reasons, it is your responsibility to call for them. Furthermore, would the patient benefit from ALS-level care?

It may be true that we generally can’t cure the primary cause of a patient’s complaint, and in many cases can’t even offer meaningful supportive care short of true life support. But these decisions are still central to the care the patient eventually does receive, and most of all how quickly. Of course, some decisions are made for us by our policies and protocols, and other decisions are patently obvious, but that still leaves substantial room for wisdom or foolishness.

Consider a critical trauma patient extricated from a MVC. In one case, we arrive and direct the fire department’s rescue, setting up the scene for safe and easy access. The patient is rapidly removed and assessed, loaded up, and transport is begun emergently to the level I trauma center 10 minutes beyond the closest community hospital. As we depart, we call ahead and notify the trauma team, relaying our status and ETA. En route, we are able to intercept with a paramedic crew, who hops aboard and jump-starts the patient’s care with IV access, pain management, and other measures. We quickly navigate through traffic and arrive in good time, bringing the patient directly into a trauma room, where staff are waiting and immediately assume care. The report is handed over, including several critical findings, and the patient is stabilized and rushed into surgery.

In this case, we “did” very little for the patient, in the sense of treatment. But consider if things had gone differently. We arrive on scene and bungle things, parking in the wrong spot and jamming up the access routes; it takes us many minutes to assess the situation and call for heavy rescue. The extrication is slow and belabored; when finished, we evaluate the patient incompletely, with a medical rather than a trauma approach. He is loaded and transported to the nearby community hospital, driving with the flow of traffic, and no entry notification is given. When we finally arrive, we sit in the triage line, give a minimal report to the nurse, and the patient is placed in a secluded hallway bed. We head out for our next call, never realizing that the patient sat there for many minutes until a doctor finally assessed him more closely and realized his severity, at which point he called immediately for ambulance transfer to the trauma center. The transferring unit took 10 minutes to arrive, 10 more to assume care, the transport itself took another 20, and the patient finally arrived in surgery an hour and a half after we first arrived on scene.

Although the eventual treatment might be identical, the difference in the timelines for these parallel patients could very well have a profound effect on their outcome. There is some debate currently as to whether time-to-care for many EMS patients could be far less important than we traditionally assume, but even if it is, there is no question that some subset of patients still exists for whom time is critical.

For a realistic illustration, consider the following, a true story of a call I ran:

You are dispatched BLS and non-emergent to a rehab facility for the complaint of “cellulitis.” On arrival, you take a report from a nurse, who explains that the patient has been with them for a week and has been experiencing inflammation of his arm for much of that time. He is severely demented but otherwise has a minimal medical history.

While you talk, your partner comes out of the patient’s room, informing you that she was unable to obtain his blood pressure. Curious, you head in, finding an elderly male accompanied by his wife. He is cheerfully confused, oriented to self only (baseline per his wife), but in no distress. He appears generally well.

His respirations are unremarkable, but his radial pulse cannot be felt, and he has a thready, barely palpable brachial pulse, 90 and regular. With several attempts, you are able to obtain a BP at ~84 systolic. His skin, however, is warm and slightly red — not overtly hot, but certainly not cool. (Your service does not carry thermometers.)

You speak with the nurse, who checks the chart and confirms the patient is typically normotensive, up to and including his last vitals check earlier today. You begin loading the patient onto your stretcher while you obtain a detailed history from the wife. Eventually, you learn that during his recent hospital stay, he had developed a seemingly minor infection of the arm due to an infected IV site.

Although the patient is still presenting well, your assessment is challenged by his poor cognitive baseline, and you are very concerned about the possibility of a developing sepsis. The seeming rapidity with which the patient’s blood pressure has dropped is especially troubling. You load up the patient, giving him some supplemental oxygen for good measure (pulse oximetry is not available), and obtaining further details of his history.

His requested facility is also the closest, a community hospital 5-10 minutes away, and the same hospital at which he was recently an inpatient. If an ALS intercept were available, you would attempt to meet them, as early goal-directed therapy for the treatment of sepsis has been shown to significantly improve outcomes, and some of those milestones are achievable in the field (such as fluid bolus). However, the nearest fly-car is several towns away, and an intercept would take much longer than direct transport. You elect to head straight for the emergency department. You attempt to call in an entry notification, but are unable to raise the receiving staff prior to your arrival.

Upon arriving, you wheel the patient into the busy ED. A harried nurse asks if this is the cellulitis patient (the facility had called previously), which you affirm. She tells you to put him in an overflow hallway bed. Pulling her aside, you mention that you have some concerns about the patient’s hypotension and the possibility of sepsis, painting a brief clinical picture. She has one of the techs clear out the critical care room near the entrance, and you move your patient there instead. After a detailed report to another nurse, you transfer over care, shake hands, and clear out. As you leave, the patient is in the process of having blood drawn.

This was ultimately a simple call, with neither sturm nor drang, and the prevailing emotion was an orderly calm rather than any frank emergency. But consider: supposing this patient were indeed septic (I was unable to obtain any follow-up), there is a clear correlation between time to definitive care and eventual morbidity and mortality. (The best practices of early sepsis care are still evolving, but most would agree that the condition should be treated as a time-critical life threat just like stroke or acute MI.) The fact that the patient seemed to be in minimal distress or extremis does not entail that he was not at a critical juncture. If he had been treated as a simple cellulitis patient going in for evaluation and non-urgent care, he would have — at best — languished in a hallway bed until eventually funneling through the facility’s triage process and being stepped-up to a higher acuity of care.

This, to me, is the central clinical skill of the EMT, on top of basic life support and trauma care, and of course patient assessment. Skilled assessment with the knowledge of pathophysiology and best practices to understand the meaning of your findings is the first half of the puzzle, and making the appropriate decisions to streamline the patient’s continuity of care is the second. This is something that can and should happen with every single patient, and it’s the most basic of BLS tools.

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