An Emergency Medical Technician is responding to a mundane Emergency Medical Services (EMS) call. What could possibly go wrong? In fact, keeping things under control is the hallmark of a seasoned EMS professional.
Truth is, moments of ineptitude can creep in unannounced and can get even the best of us. How can EMS professionals apply EMS knowledge consistently and correctly? How can they be sure that they’re not overlooking any steps?
Twenty first century medicine is raided with cases of ineptitude. Data from legal malpractice claims points to roughly 30% of patients with stroke and an overwhelming 60% of patients with pneumonia receiving incomplete or inappropriate care. This is in spite of all the tremendous gains we’ve made in medicine and the sheer volume of knowledge available to treat these conditions.
When responding to a medical emergency, mastery of complex amounts of knowledge can no longer be left to best effort and experience. Even the best trained emergency medical professionals with tons of experience require more than know-how to have successful patient outcomes. The volume and complexity of emergency medicine protocols demands a strategy to best steward the knowledge available and avoid over reliance on human mastery.
What do you do when faced with these significant challenges in modern medicine? How can you get ahead of a simple single misstep that could potentially erase a patient’s chance of survival? Ramp up training requirements? Push for more experience and expertise? Implement incentives for EMS professionals to know their protocols cold?
Perhaps learn a thing or two from the airline industry? After all, they’ve had tremendous success providing step-by-step checklists to help reinforce what pilots already know. Why should we expect EMS professionals to have to reliably carry out complex interventions purely from memory?
The Helpfie Smart EMS checklist serves as a reference guide to help EMS professionals with the mundane, routine patient care protocols that may be overlooked when they find themselves in highly stressful, demanding emergency situations. The Smart EMS checklist instills the kind of discipline that reminds EMS professionals to follow all the minimum necessary steps. These steps can no longer be deemed pointless and need to be the norm. One step done correctly after another is a sure proven path that works like clockwork when time is of the essence.
EMS professionals can download the Helpfie Smart EMS Checklist from the Google Play Store (Access code: check) for a free month trial — offer ends June 30th, 2021. Tell us what you think of the Smart EMS Checklist at: bit.ly/emschecklistfeedback