Day Two: Still Not Dead

Two posts in a row! Woo hoo!

I'm working on the training for Monday, and one of the things I want to do is help people in the department who are not EMTs, but who go to calls to support what we are doing, be better able to provide that support.

There are a lot of parts to this.

One of the things I want to address has to do with being able to help family members make sense of what is going on, what the EMS providers (both from our agency, and from our automatic-mutual-aid transporting agency) are doing to and for their loved one.

Those of us who have been doing this for years, with a variety of levels of training and opportunity, get pretty accustomed to some of what happens on scene, and it is easy to forget that it can be entirely unfamiliar to others.

Case in point: I found a video online of someone putting in an IO. A real patient (it only shows their leg, but it's a real person.) And... that is pretty uncomfortable to watch. More uncomfortable to watch than to do, I think, which is interesting. But I want our people to know what to expect, what it looks like, what it sounds like, and what it is for, so they can explain in layman's terms to someone else, who is more than likely completely unaware that such a thing is even possible.

A LOT of what we do can look terrifying to someone unfamiliar with it, especially when it is happening to someone in their family. It would be nice to help things be a little less scary, and easier to do that if we practice some actual words to say.