Medical Preparedness

[Yogimus]

It's probably a topic for its own thread, but I was wondering what anybody would suggest as a route to better emergency medical training without the risk of losing the protection of good samaritan laws? Because it is my understanding that in general, as your level of recognized training increases, your potential legal liability also increases since you lose the protection generally afforded a lay person who is just trying to help out.

step 1: Provide zero information at the scene to the victim or to responding units

[Aesop]

I suppose you could take the courses and never test or register.

However, emt/paramedic/nurses/etc do have protection under state laws as long as they do not exceed their level of training, and their actions meet the "prudent and reasonable" standard.

step 1: Provide zero information at the scene to the victim or to responding units

Taking the courses doesn't obligate you to register for the state certification (but you should, at least once, if only to document that you did it). Whether you do, or ever renew afterwards, is up to each person.

You're responsible at any level of expertise or non-expertise, to be reasonable and prudent to the level of your current certification, and given your available resources. The technical term for a guy who passed an EMT course, or even med school, but doesn't have the current card, is "bystander".
I've stopped many times, but I'm not held to the same standard of care at the side of the road as I am in the ER.
I am always expected not to be a dumbass, or try some wild horse@#!^ I saw some brainiac extoll on YouTube.

When I'm in the same city I normally work in, about 80-90% of the firefighters/paramedics know me by sight anyways. I carry and flash my hospital ID if necessary. But whether there or 1000 miles from home, I don't hand out business cards to people to whom I render assistance. Once the big red truck/box shows up, I wave to the policeman, and let them know I've handed off care to the paramedics. If they say anything to me at less than the rate of speech of a cattle auctioneer, they're talking to tire tracks, and I'm 1/4 mile down the traffic stream. I can count the number of times I've stuck around long enough to be identified on police reports on my thumbs.

Once was because the victim was so jacked up, I couldn't, in good conscience, leave the first responders short-handed.
The other time, two LAFD paramedics were working a full arrest in Car B on their own, no engine task force at scene, when I arrived, and at their request, I maintained spinal immobilization on the drunken dumbass in Car A who caused it until their back-up arrived. For my trouble, they thanked me most sincerely.

Followed by the LAPD asshole on scene, Officer Bar-Brady, who was shitting his pants pulling me aside for not "respecting his authoritay" and crossing his imaginary police line, which like himself, wasn't on scene when I arrived moments after the crash. He proceeded to search the contents of my first aid kit looking for drug paraphenalia and other contraband, and when that clever fishing expedition failed, began at length to explain to me that the college of nursing I reported I was then attending didn't exist, so I must be lying about my training. As I was returning home from a Red Cross event where I'd been the actual medic, wearing black uniform slacks and a white uniform shirt with huge red crosses in three places, me pulling my current county EMT, CPR, and nursing student ID cards out of my breast pocket just about sent him into orbit. He was barking mad, livid, near a fit of apoplexy, and he couldn't do a damn thing about it without pulling his pants down and spanking himself in front of the crowd of onlookers.

It wasn't his fault that the badge they issued him weighed 800 pounds, and the hospital where he was born only gave him a room-temperature IQ.

I didn't officially beef him, but I did have a productive give-and-take chat with his watch supervisor at the station a few minutes later. And, it should be noted, this was about 6 months before the original Rodney King incident. So I think I came out ahead, since I didn't get clubbed into insensibility, and he probably got shot at for being an assclown. So things even out. (I keep hoping to run into him someday as a PD retiree doing movie standby work, since I'll remember him, but I doubt he'll remember me. It should be good for a laugh. I'll probably ask him if he wants to go through my kit again, just to be sure.)

But the rule of thumb is pretty much the hippie motto from the 1970s:
Do unto others, then split.

[Termite]

EMR course update to follow. Maybe tomorrow. I'm happy....... and dissatisfied.

Meanwhile, I'm gonna eat dinner and drink a couple of beers. I have, in the last 2 months, worked 21 days offshore, come in for 7, gone back out for 17, came in for 2 at home, then spent the last 5 days in Lafayette at a hotel in EMR school.

It's Happy Hour, as Pawpaw says.