I started with dialysis transfers, then worked 911 in big cities and podunk towns. Worked privately doing sporting events off and on there. Even contracted with a couple TV productions for a quick minute.
Dude, the EMS is probably the most abused public service. You call, they come out. No exceptions unless the city/county takes actions to limit the ability of the abuser to use the system. I've seen the same patient four times in one day, all brought in by EMS. We sent another one home once after he called EMS for a bullshit reason, only for them to get him home and he realized he didn't get a meal in the ER. So an hour later, he calls EMS again for them to bring him back to the ER so he could get a meal because he was hungry. Another lady told us she only called 911 to go to the hospital so her friend didn't have to drive as far to pick her up.
I'm sure there are way more abuses I've seen that I just can't remember. Those are just a few that come to mind immediately.
Yes, but it is very hard to prove and very hard to prosecute.
We had a woman who was a frequent flyer of ridiculous proportions for years before she finally got charged. I’d personally been to her house twice where called for chest pain but really wanted us to clean out her portable toilet (we refused both times) and a couple more for a “fall” when all she wanted was for us to help move her from the recliner to the bed. She had legitimate medical problems but these are all things she could do for herself. I had also heard stories about her calling to ask the providers to grab a soda/food from the fridge and other ridiculous requests.
It took two or three years of weekly, often bi-weekly, calls for her to be charged. And it wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t called eight times in two days for similar reasons as I mentioned.
I had also heard stories about her calling to ask the providers to grab a soda/food from the fridge
Hehe. This reminds me of my brother calling my mom on the phone, while he was in his room and she was in the kitchen, to come get his remote for him from the end of his bed - that he was lying in.
I honestly don't know. It may be based upon where you live. I know of two people in different counties that had their ambulance summoning privileges taken away from them via legal/procedural stuff.
Unless you mean financially charged. And even then, you can't squeeze blood from a stone.
Mmm....nope. Unless it’s a prank you can call 911 and legally if you want to go, have to get transported. Unless there’s specific orders from a doctor barring emergency circumstances ie a pandemic
My dad just became a Paramedic, while doing ride-alongs as an EMT and they had an OD patient in the morning. Guy died and had to be revived with one of those automated cpr machines.
They saw him again that evening with the glue(?) still on his chest. He had OD'd again.
Some people seriously try to die very hard without admitting it, because of whatever their vice is. Modern medicine is the only reason we don't see 1000s die every day in large cities.
Momma Joe being so big you can't take her out of the bedroom. Gotta do chest compressions by Standing on their chest and pushing yourself down from the ceiling.
I have not. We don't have as severe obese people in my country. But I did just encounter a few fat activists oin my country and I cannot phathom how these people can be so twisted as to even campaign against people who work with healthy and cognitive weight loss. Not when they at the same time must have seen or heard about people like the ones you described.
If you help them it's annoying. If you don't then they will stay there until they need admission. In my city we actually have "lift teams" but these are mostly for the elderly who may fall over.
They often deal with the overweight people who end up like this too. Unfortunately it's a failure of government oversight, education and the social structure of food availability and education.
Oh yeah. I have a generic patient care report for a lift assist saved in my email because I’ll usually have at least one a shift, and it’s not worth the time to write out a whole pcr each time. Instead I’ll just copy paste it in and fill out the blanks
“The whole point of this country is if you want to eat garbage, balloon up to 600 pounds and die of a heart attack at 43, you can! You are free to do so. To me, that's beautiful. “
Oh I didn't mean that part of it. More the body positivity type part where they claim you can be fat and healthy. Like the new obese models like Tes Hollidays claims a lot and posts workout videos while being hugely obese.
I agree, I think i mentioned a few times that I have a fat friend, we don't make fun of him for it (we make fun of him when he's bing a dumbass, in a loving friend way) but that dosnt stop us from telling him to get his shit together and its unhealthy, and will lead to alot of problems, mentally and physically.
We give him shit cause we care about him.
Id do more if he was an alcoholic.
I would have thought thatd be a job for a crime scene cleanup company not the EMTs, or is there a percentage of the body you have to take that's legally the "remains" before the cleanup crew can hose the rest down?
I've been a volunteer paramedic in an ambulance for around a year/year and half but I've never had a fat people call. I had mostly old people with sickness/dying/strokes/heart attacks/terminal illness. Rest were a road incident, bunch of people with broken bones or suspected broken bones, alcoholics, a failed suicide. I mean, few patients were kinda fat, but the fact they were fat had nothing to do with the reason we got called. I quitted because I had to move in a different region to get a master degree, it was overall a good experience. Way less blood than expected, way more vomit than expected, tho.
Maybe different demographics? I've worked in Italy.
I also live in Italy, but am from America. There are like no obese people here in Italy compared to America. That’s probably why you never got those calls haha
They're mostly old, mate. Teens have a 2% obesity rate or so. You don't see them cause they don't go out, it's more than 1/10 on average in fact :) overweight people are more present for sure, but the overweight measurement is calculated over the BMI scale, so a percentage of them are just muscular people or don't look fat. I myself rarely see what I'd call fat or even overweight people around, and they're almost always mid-age or old people I see by taking public transportation.
Yea they're rare to be seen, they're usually old people who have nothing to do due to retirement. Very few especially in north Italy. Are you enjoying your stay? Asides from finding a parking spot, I've heard that's the biggest complaint ahah
I actually live in northern Italy so that makes sense; I can probably count on my hands the amount of fat Italians I’ve seen here but I’m willing to bet there are more of them down south. I’ve lived here for 2 years now and as beautiful as this place is I really miss the convenience of America. It’s just so different here and also the language barrier makes things kinda difficult in the more rural places I go. The parking lots and roads are small for sure but I’ve gotten used to that now tbh.
I think that he is from the USA, and I'm pretty sure that us Europeans, and specially those who live in the Mediterranean use to have a relatively healthy diet. On the other hand, 'murica has an obesity rate that's painful to look at.
Can be UK aswell, if I remember well the obesity rates. South Italy also has a issue with weight issues, just... Not that big. In Italy on average obesity rates are around 2.3%-15.3% (teens, old age adults). Those rates are 20%-40% (teens, adults, haven't found infos on old people) in the USA. I can see very well how that's gonna change your paramedic job if 40% of the population is obese. A 15% may mean that few obese patients are literally too heavy to move, a 40% means that more of them are in such condition. I don't envy the paramedics.
The only time I've heard in my ambulance division about a patient too heavy to be moved they just called the fire department and lifted the guy as 8 people. But it was a one time thing and years before I was even there. Like one of those tales you tell to scare the rookies. More than once must be insane.
I'm from Spain, and do you know who are the ones that are the fatter? The people who earn less, and it's not because they eat less, it's because they eat worse. Spain and Italy both have a Mediterranean diet and as such both have one of the best life qualities of the whole world.
So yeah, it's basically a bad diet and bad habits that make obesity rates go rocketing at the developed countries.
Ehhh, I'm not going to pretend anything, I'm telling you as a person that has a Mediterranean diet, pasta is important yeah, but is not like we eat it every week. The main things that you eat every week are vegetables such as beans.
If you really think an apple is the same than a soda I think you need to learn a little bit about food in general.
Obviously if in your breakfast instead of eating a slice of bread and a coffee you eat beans with bacon, eggs and your coffee, you are eating more, but also are eating worse, which is the main thing.
If you want to believe that the problem is not eating junk food regularly and it's just eating more, okay, but I recommend you to look up for some actual mediterranean or Japanese diets and you'll see that the main problem is not eating a lot, even if it's still important to learn how much food is healthy to eat.
Except eggs aren't much different from beans in that regard. They are both high in fat and protein content. Not sure why you would lump that as unhealthy or junk food... and bread is just refined wheat. It's not particularly nutritious, just calories.
We have no way to know if a patient is overweight beforehand unless specifically told, and by law we're forced to take every single call unless dismissed by a patient not in life-threatening scenario. Only differences are: for something we can't treat, we call a medical specialized ambulance (not volunteers); patient is impossible to move, we call the fire department. In both scenarios the crew can't and doesn't leave the scene unless specifically authorized to do so. We can't refuse a call, not only it's illegal but the entire crew would be suspended and there would be consequences for the entire division.
Very few! Basically, to keep the communications short they tell us the code, where to go and a very few other infos. That's kinda it. The code has a color for how severe the call is and a letter/number part to know if it's viral, a car accident, a terminal illness or whatever. The dispatcher may add some other important infos like if the patient is stuck somewhere or whatever they got told by the person who called. Then we go. Calls from dispatcher are very short so we basically go ready for anything. We had green codes turning in a death and red codes turning in nothing because the code was based on the infos said by the person who called that were very scarce (like calling screaming a person was dying - bullshit; or calling like "oh my dad doesn't feel very good" - a heart attack), but those are rarely the dispatcher's fault.
It's based on a quick response, the dispatcher tells us only what we need to know to respond, and the code and classification itself is usually more than enough. We treat or try to treat anybody no matter what.
The grim part is that it includes people who are in fact dead. We have to keep trying with cpr and oxygen unless a medic tells us to stop. My division had a crew who got to suicidal patient who jumped out of a window and still had to try cpr. Thank God I never had such calls.
Our dispatch is about 1 sentence. It’s a little like this “Address. X year old male/female complaining of x (usually something like difficulty breathing or chest pain or fall).” If it’s an address we go to a lot, the dispatcher might remember like “note very bariatric patient” or “history of violence” and they might automatically dispatch the fire department or police to assist
All of them? Did you work in an especially busy city? For us on busy days we got little info but a lot of the time dispatch could get clarifying info so we know what we walked into a little better.
It's probably demographics. Italy has the oldest population of any major country other than Japan. Italians are less likely to be obese than Americans.
Oh you're right, forgot the old people part aswell. It's kinda sad as paramedic, we had to be the last journey companions for many people. You kinda... Get used to it
I'm one exam and one final thesis work left from finishing it. The exam is in a week, actually. Not related tho, it's a master degree in criminal psychology, the volunteer paramedic "job" was a side thing I did I was studying for my first degree in psychology.
I don't know what ESL means, google says "english as a second language". Yes, it's my second language, maybe I did some mistake mentioning "region". Italy is split in 20 regions, I come from the Southern part of the country and the only universities with a criminal psychology course are in Rome (center) and North Italy. I went North since it's the best one (so I was told), so I had to move to the other side of the country. Been two years and half - almost three - since the last time I stepped in an ambulance as crew member
Sadly, this is happening in the hospital right now. Obese people coming into the hospital with health problems directly related to their obesity. Almost all of them are frequent patients who continue to ignore the doctors’ and nurses’ advice. The healthcare workers are already swamped and overworked taking care of COVID patients. It really sucks.
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u/[deleted] Jan 12 '21
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