If you haven't seen me already, i'm Josh. I am 17 and i live in the UK, currently in college.
I am interested in joining the ambulance service, preferably as a paramedic/emergency care practitioner. I have been out with an ambulance technician for a weekend observer shift a couple of years ago due to a well know contact and i guess my interest grew from there too. I have been looking at ways to go about this and the 2 that seem the most interesting are;
2 year Paramedic Sciences degree @ University
3 year Student Paramedic course in scenario workshops and on scene training
I'm just asking on the off-chance that any of you racers are based in the ambulance service (preferably within the UK) and if you have any good tips and advice that may prove useful.
I guess it takes some bottle to do that job though, i mean, seeing the consequences of road accidents and stuff like that can't be nice can it. My mum was a nurse for years and she saw some hideous things during that time.
All i can say is good luck to you and i hope it works out mate.
Slightly OT but i was gonna join the army a few months back and i said to my dad that from what i hear the army life could be ok, to which he replied 'until you get blown up by the taliban' which was less than inspiring!
My brother is paramedic, specialized on emergency treatment, so he gets to be one of the first on the worst kind of accidents. You need both a very strong personality and a good team which does psychological supervising to cope with that on a dalily base. Still, especially after lethal highway accidents with children, he tends to be a bit on the pale and not eating side for a few days.
As he works for the red cross, he started as a volunteer with a basic training and worked himself up through courses, and is now getting schooled to be a chopper pilot.
Ugh, blood, guts, gore, definitely not my thing. But i'm damned pleased there are people like you out there to keep lunatics like us alive
The only thing i can suggest is trying some voluntary work with the St John Ambulance. It should give you a taste of what the job entails, see if it really is for you.
It's great to know that you are aiming to do somthing like this! I am 16 right now and have been volunteering at a local Rescue Squad (it has a payed day shift and night time volunteering shift) and go there once every six days. Right now, because it's the school year, I can only stay from 6-11 pm (5 hours) but normally there are 12, 18, 24 hour shifts.
Right now, over the summer, I got certified as an EMT (sure you know what that is). You might be an EMT or something equivalent right now as well. From my experiences, I can tell you that if you really enjoy something like this, you will enjoy working hard at it. I will tell you that it takes time to get used to it. It's so much different than what you learn in the classroom.
If you are aiming to do something in the medical field, I would suggest volunteering at some other medical places like a Red Cross, hospital, and definitely a rescue squad (don't know if UK has them.)
If you have any questions to ask about volunteering at a rescue squad, feel free to ask me.
Nice to know of someone in a similar field. The job of emergency technician is still alive over here, however ambulances services are no longer recruiting them, they still operate but they are being killed-off. The most common way to qualify as a paramedic other than a degree, was something like Patient Transport Service > Technician > Paramedic, all with training along the way to move you up each role.
We do have 'rescue squads' here, especially the Red Cross and St Johns Ambulance, which seems to be the most useful to me.
Btw, if you are planning to become a paramedic, I would definitely recommend the 3 year program. It is one more year, but it will be more useful and have you a lot more prepared. Learning the course material without any real world experience is useless in this field.
I was a paramedic in army , also drove around city with ambulance for 4 months, I've brought back some lives from certain death...damn that felt good...but sadly lost even more, but all that downside of life started to crack my head little by little, so i think you have to be strong person to love that job! Respect mate!
First let me state that I'm not an EMT-Paramedic, but an EMT-Critical Care. In NY they are pretty much the same thing but with some protocol differences depending on where you are. I live in a place called Nassau County, in here the running joke is that there is no difference between a CC and a Medic as long as the CC has a cellphone (or mobile phone for your brits). They say that because I can do almost everything a Paramedic can do in the field (that is minus providing a needle cricothyrotomy.). There are some things I must ask permission to do where an Paramedic can just do.
With that said, I've never had a call, or run where I felt anything, it's my job I just do it without thinking to much about the person, it allows you to do the best thing for the patient and the best for your crew, and the best for the student that might be with you. I had not a week ago a 70 Year old Male who shot himself in the head because he was in so much pain from the cancer that had just spread to his spine, you get on scene and this you do your job, you have to disconnect yourself from the world slightly to do this. Being an EMT (Just a EMT-Basic) can pronounce someone dead as I did that day. You will get domestic assaults where the wife beats the husband and vise versa. You will get calls for the town drunk, that you start to know by name and know his medical history better then he does! You will get the stabbings, and the narcotic overdoses, and the codes (a code is a cardiac arrest, or respiratory arrest, there heart stops / they stop breathing, or both!).
A word on codes, aka Cardiac and or Respiratory arrests. A cardiac arrest in the presence of respiratory arrest is one of the strangest calls you can get as an BLS (Basic Life Support) or ALS (Advanced Life Support) provider. You are doing CPR on a dead body in the hopes that you can bring them back to life. Now I've saved 4 lives, but I've had 18 codes, so the chances of getting someone back is pretty slim at the best of times. We are pretty lucky to have some very good protocols here, I can give a heart beat to a rock with some of the drugs that I have at my disposal, but at the same time what am I saving? By the time some one notices that there loved one is not breathing, and no longer has a pulse it might have been 10 minutes, at that point they still have to call 911 and get an ambulance dispatched to their location. By the time they call 911 brain damage has already started, so what am I saving? Well it depends, of the 4 people I've saved, only one of them can hold a conversation with me today.
In Emergency Care there is the four chains of life that must work together in order to save someone. Early Notification (Calling for Help), Early Defibulation (Shocking the patent with an AED when they first go into a lethal rhythm (V-Tach, V-Fib)). Early ALS ([I'm an ALS provider] so that I can start ACLS (Advanced Cardiac Life Support) procedures.), Early Transport (To a hospital.). Any failing and the patient might not survive, or might end up in a worse state then they started.
It is true that I've providing a very pessimistic view, but you need to know what your getting into, and there is always an great upside to everything that has a great downside.
Saving some ones life, knowing that some one is walking and talking because of something you did is the best feeling in the world, I don't care what drugs you take, this one is better. Getting your first call, and the rush you get when you get dispatched is pretty intense in it's own right, and everyone I known's first call is always a doozie (it might just be the area that I am in). Your first call as a certified Emergency Medical Technician where you are the 'Tech in Charge' and you provide all of the patient care, scary and fun kinda like riding a roller coaster. Your first call as an ALS provider, where there is no one to save your ass, (as an EMT-CC out ranks that of an EMT-B or just plain EMT) as you are the ALS provider, I can't call for ALS backup, because that's you! Pushing your first medication via IV, like for example Narcan (That blocks the effects of opioid based drugs such as heroin) and watching the patient who is in respiratory arrest start breathing again. Or pushing Adenosine on your first patient with SVT and watching there heart stop you holding your breath hoping it comes back and then their heart starts again. Shocking your first patient is also pretty insane (yes, they really do jump!). Getting your first tube (EndoTracheal Tube is a tube that goes into the mouth and into the trachea it's an advanced airway skill that EMT-CC's and EMT-Paramedics can provide) on a real patient. These are all insanely cool things, and I can't wait for you to experience them as well.
Welcome to the wacky world of Emergency Medicine. I'm a Lieutenant @ the ambulance corps, I've been doing this for 3 years, I've been an EMT-Basic for 2, and an EMT-Critical Care for 1 year. My best advise, book smarts are great, but if you want to saves lives, you need to get into the street. You need to get street smart, and you need to get that patient contact. You might know the signs and symptoms of APE (Acute Pulmonary Edema) but without having seen it first hand with an experienced technician that can point it out to you, you can miss something that huge. So ride with people who know what they are doing, immerse yourself in this field and you will do fine, but if you want to be good, expect to spend the next years of your life living, sleeping, breathing and eating EMS.
Good luck, and if you want any help: http://www.wlvacc.org/ That's my ambulance corps cadet website, I go there everyday and it's very much orientated to new providers.
How often do get codes and such? So far I have been volunteering at my rescue squad for exactly six months, one day and have gotten three codes. We saved two of them because we're awesome (but mostly because both started coding as we got on scene). Are you a volunteer or paid staff for it?
A quick fyi for Dygear. I think my account on the wlvacc site still needs activating by a mod, i have no permissions although i can see you sent a public message i can't open it etc.
