It’s the System
People who experience sudden illness or injury are in no position to assess the knowledge and skills of the emergency medical folks who show up to care for them. They rely on the providers themselves and the EMS system leaders to ensure that EMS professionals know what to do and how to do it. Sadly many if not most EMS leaders don’t really know how skilled or knowledgeable their employees are. I was discussing this yesterday over a Grande, non-fat, no-syrup, green tea latte at Starbucks with Baxter and Todd from the UCLA Center for Prehospital Care. We were talking about designing a knowledge competency test for one of the EMS systems that we work with. Baxter said, “Why don’t we test everyone anonymously? That way we’ll learn what the system leaders and educators need to do to improve the overall knowledge and no individual employee will be singled out.” Baxter’s suggestion shows the essential difference between old style quality assurance where we work to improve people and quality management where we focus on making system improvements. It’s a lesson that we can’t learn too often.
Jason Creamer, EMT-P on August 31st, 2008
Mike;
Although we haven’t met we do know some of the same people. I recently have had issues over something that seems to be near and dear to your heart with regard to pain management. I also downloaded one of your articles on this subject “Taking EMS into the future”. The issue is treating patients with abdominal pain, specifically those experiencing peritoneal symptoms (abdominal pain) with a diagnosis of appendicitis. I have had very good anecdotal success in using versed by itself to accomplish very good pain relief. I do understand that versed is not a tradiotnal analgesic, however I also understand that if you treat the cause of a patients’ pain directly, you should get a desirable response and effect from that. Do you know of any articles or research that have address using benzodiazepines for treatment of acute pain / abdominal pain?