How to become a Master Paramedic

[Guest guest]

I am fortunate enough to work with some fine paramedics, and we spend a lot

of time together talking over calls and trying to figure out how to improve.

We also have a relatively new medic with us who is very bright and wants to

know about everything.

One of my sometime partners happens to work in a cath lab and I've learned

about a dozen new and wonderful things about ECG interpretation from him in

the last 24 hours. We all learned together how to spot hypercalcemia after

that possibility came up in a patient we had transported. We sat around for

the better part of 3 hours yesterday looking at strips, exploring the

Internet for examples of electrolyte imbalances and showing all this stuff to

the " new " medic who was fascinated by it all. We dissected strips from calls

we had made and compared them to textbook examples, trying to decide what we

were seeing.

My partner and I showed him how to read a 12 lead and how the cardiologist

knows which coronary artery to look at from the ECG. We taught him how to

look at the whole heart with a 3 lead machine by making modified chest leads.

I learned that the cardiologists give a blast of 200 mcgs of nitro directly

into the CA they are going to enter to dilate it. Does this help me in my

practice? I think it does, because it helps me to know more about the

physiology of the heart and what can be happening with a patient I run an ECG

on.

I also gave him my recipe for treating the acute asthma patient who's TTD,

and other stuff.

What's the point of this post? That learning should be taking place

constantly. That once you go to work your learning has just started. Of

course it's ridiculous to expect any new medic, licensed or not, to jump in

and begin to operate the same way a veteran does. The workplace is the next

classroom, and it can be a wonderful one. Good medics learn from each other

constantly. They try out ideas, debate treatments and come out better for

it.

I'm very sorry for those who have to work in an environment that's not

intellectually challenging and demanding. Life must be very dull and tedious

for them.

I'm fortunate to work with people who are professionals in every sense of the

word and who are genuinely still thrilled by the opportunity to learn every

day from one another AND from their patients.

You get to be a Master Paramedic by working with Master Paramedics and

learning from them. YOu get to be a Master Paramedic by coming in after

every call and looking up the drugs you didn't recognize, going to the

Internet and reading about a condition you hadn't seen in a while, talking

things over with your peers.

A good educational foundation is required, but it's only the platform that

the Master Paramedic is built upon.

Gene G.