Intro to Paramedicine

Recently I helped a future classmate move to Kingston. She is a paramedic herself, and so were a few of the others helping. Thus I had the opportunity to, very briefly, learn a few small things about paramedicine!

Paramedics work hard! They are scheduled for twelve hours at a time, which can become longer when calls come late in the shift. The medics that I was talking to work in Toronto, where they tell me that the calls come frequently with little time between. The job can also be physically demanding, for example carrying stretchers or doing CPR compressions.

One thing that struck me, was how confident these paramedics have become at performing procedures that strike me as terrifying! One of them told me how easy he found it to intubate a patient in the hospital after practicing the procedure in the field under more difficult conditions. Having no clinical experience myself, I was in awe of their competence and confidence!

It seems that there is a frustrating amount of bureaucracy that goes back and forth between paramedics and hospitals. Medics are required to stay with a patient until they are given a hospital bed in the ER. Lacking space and staff, the hospitals abuse this policy by putting patients into an “offload delay” that locks the paramedics into looking after the patient so that the ER staff doesn’t have to. More than one of the people I talked with said that hospital bureaucracy is their least favorite part of the job.

It was a huge pleasure to meet these professionals! It will be very many years before I even begin to learn some of the skills and knowledge that these people have acquired through experience and training.