Skip Kirkwood's Blog (6)

What a week. Friday a mass shooting in Binghamton, NY, and today three police officers killed in Pittsburgh, PA. Following the week when 8 were murdered in a nursing home in Carthage, NC. Please keep the families of the fallen officers, and our EMS colleagues who had to respond to thesescenes, in our thoughts and prayers. So - how do we help to prepare ourselves situations like this? And how do we keep ourselves from becoming victims? We probably need to spend some time, with our colleagues, o… Continue

In his closing keynote at EMS TODAY, Steve Berry (addressing public perception of EMS) urged listeners to adopt some of the professionalism of our public safety counterparts-- fire, law enforcement and the military. He believes we’re a mix of medical and public safety, but that in order to cement an image of EMS in the public’s mind, we should accept that the public affiliates us more with public safety than the medical profession, and we should work with that perception rather than against it.… Continue

Many of the posts on this network site, and others, bemoan the plight of poor, overworked, underpaid, and under-respected EMS providers. Yet, the EMS community does not seem to have an active labor movement working to improve this environment. I must confess that I'm not a union guy - I'm a chief in a right-to-work, no collective bargaining for public employees state. So the situation probably works to my advantage - maybe. But I am curious. It seems that much of the economic and political su… Continue

I was reading the March 2009 issue of Prehospital Emergency Care (for those who don't read it, it is the major peer-review journal devoted to EMS in the US). I was excited to see, buried amongst the clinical and pseudo-clinical research abstracts, a few studies that might help us run our services better. One was a before and after study of the impact of implementing power stretchers in a large county EMS agency. We've gt a ton of clinical research going on - the physicians see to that. But how… Continue

Hate is a strong word. I HATE hearing about medics getting injured, disabled, killed in the line of duty. Since I play the bagpipes and I'm a public safety guy, I go to more than my fair share of public safety funerals. It is distressing to see the impact of these mostly-unnecessary, mostly-preventable deaths on friends, families, agencies, and communities. It's hardened me a good bit over the years - to the point where I don't feel at all bad about dropping the disciplinary hammer on a medic… Continue

First, you have to read the story: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/health/article5420921.ece On one hand, you have to ask, what was wrong with these guys, that they were even having these thoughts, never mind expressing them? On the other hand, I wonder if there is a charge such as described in the article, in England or in the U.S. It sounds kind of like "criminal thinking out loud" or "felonious bad heart" or something. In any case, what a nightmare for the EMS agency! I can't imag… Continue