When you’re involved with EMS social media, you see a lot of stuff scrolling through. Some of it, like FOAMfrat, does a great job of making advanced life support and critical care concepts easy to understand. Someone much smarter than me said “Smart people take difficult concepts and make them easy to understand.”
Unfortunately, you also see some material that does the opposite. A few moments ago, I saw a proposed post for an EMS education group that I help manage. The post was about a flowchart than an instructor developed for EMT students to assess and manage patients. Unfortunately, the flowchart was poorly laid out and looked more like a bad Microsoft Project diagram for IT project management. I’d be surprised if the average EMT student could follow it, much less master it. And if by some fluke they did, they’d be convinced that they had achieved some level of mastery of medicine. (Spoiler alert. A lot of EMT training is based on the same stuff that our ancestors learned in Boy Scouts or from the green American Red Cross first aid book.)
Friends, whether you’re a new student in a first responder class or an experienced flight paramedic, EMS isn’t all that complex. Let’s stop trying to make it complex. For at least some of it, we make it complex so as to justify our ego and sense of self-importance. The average EMS textbook is written at roughly a tenth-grade reading level. That fact alone should bring you right back to Earth.
At all levels, prehospital care can be summed thus. For trauma care: control the bleeding, protect the airway, and get the patient to an appropriate trauma facility. For medicine: assess, diagnose, treat, and get the patient to the right hospital the first time to fix their problem. If you can do those things, do two other things as well. First, be nice. Second, make the patient comfortable. Both of these additional guidelines also apply to being nice to the patient’s family, bystanders, and other healthcare professionals. The only variation between an entry level first responder and a flight nurse will be in the treatment options and assessment tools you have available to you.
EMS doesn’t have to be hard. But if all of this is still too hard or complex to understand, I’ll leave you with some sage advice that I got from an experienced flight medic the day I got my paramedic certification. “If you don’t know what else to do, it’s a good idea to take the patient to the hospital.”
EMS. No, it doesn’t have to be hard.