Some hospitals are great at taking care of sick people. Some excel at different things. We have one that does trauma fairly well, but will kill your ROSC cardiac arrest victim in a matter of minutes. It's as if they're personally offended that you brought them an arrest victim with an etCO2 of 35, an spO2 of 97%, and a BP of 100/60, and immediately go about changing those things, albeit with not quite the outcome they had in mind.

And then, there are the hospitals that every medic has on their "For the love of God, don't take me there under any circumstances" list. TOTWTYTR says you should avoid any hospital with Saint, Mercy or Memorial in the name, and St. Mary of Mercy Memorial Medical Center will probably kill your patient before the ink is dry on your PCR.

We've got some hospitals like that. They're the kind of place capable only of caring for people that, well… don't need to be in a hospital anyway.

And funny thing is, the size of the hospital seems to have little to do with it.

Got to work yesterday and logged into the Hive Mind like a good little Borg drone, and discovered this piece of exciting news: our cardiac arrest resuscitation rate for the first quarter of 2011 was 35.29%.

That's survival to hospital discharge neurologically intact, folks, based on the Utstein reporting template. Considering that The Borg covers most of the southern half of Louisiana, a few counties in Mississippi, and a substantial chunk of territory in Texas along the I-10 corridor, and over half of our territory is considered rural…

… well, that's pretty damned good.

We're not, say, Seattle/King County Medic One or Wake County EMS rocking survival rates above 40%, but at least next time somebody talks smack about private, for-profit EMS, I can wave these numbers under his nose and say, "Oh yeah? Well, how many did your fire department save this year, Hydrant Boy?"

We're not doing anything special to get these success rates. Other than the obvious factors like response times, all we're doing is good CPR – uninterrupted chest compressions and aoviding hyperventilation. To that end, we work our codes on scene and only transport if we get ROSC, and we de-emphasized ETI to the level of post-ROSC stabilization maneuver. If you can get the tube without interrupting chest compressions, fine, but if not, the Supervisor Drones are not going to come whack you on the pee pee because you chose to use a Combitube or BVM. 

Even better, based on the data we're getting from our CODE STAT software, there's still room for improvement in the quality of CPR we're delivering. Improving that ought to help us keep those numbers, and perhaps even exceed them.
 

There's an employment opportunity out there!

From what I gather, most of Connecticut is covered by volunteer EMS agencies. Still, many of them have difficulty filling their duty rosters and must rely on paid EMTs from staffing agencies to fill their open spots.

One such staffing agency, Emergency Resource Management, is looking for a few EMTs to cover PRN shifts at the volunteer agencies who contract their services.

If you're a Connecticut EMT-B or higher with a year or more of field experience, and you have the time to spare outside of work and your volunteer commitment, this might be a nice way to pick up a little extra spending money.

… all the family photos on your patient's wall are mug shots.

Seriously, Doug E. Fresh and I worked a call last night, and our patient had pictures of all her children and grandchildren on the living room wall.

That in itself is not unusual, but what was unusual was that at least two of the photos were cropped mug shots, both grainy black and whites, probably clipped from the local paper and enlarged. No other photos of either of those two males anywhere in evidence.

Maybe it's just me, but if I had a couple of children whose only extant photographs were of them standing in front of a height chart holding numbers in front of their chests, I'd be trying to deny they were mine.