MERGINET.News! November 18th Issue Online!

["Richard Bilger" <rbilger@merginet.com>]

We're pleased to bring you the latest additions to
MERGINET.News (November 2001 Vol. 6, No. 11).
You can view this issue online at:

http://www.merginet.com/index-news.htm
Select "MERGINET.News" or "Current Issue" from
the navigation menu's.

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FROM THE EDITORS:
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In this month of thanksgiving, we take time here at MERGINET to offer you
some thanks from patients. These people were interviewed from their beds in
the hospital, after they had time to reflect on their emergency experience.
Doug Krause, from Colorado's Eagle County Ambulance District, and Mona
Vanek, a retired EMT-B living in Montana, spent time with these patients and
were reminded how appreciative people are of emergency workers.

In early September (before the terrorist atrocities), Poland's Dr. Samuel
Nkire Mbazuigwe attended the First Mediterranean Emergency Medicine Congress
in Stresa, Italy. There, the gathering of international physicians generated
a position statement on "The Role of Government in Securing Emergency
Medical Care." We offer it in this issue.

Returning feature writers Liz Criss and Keith Wesley offer more of their
expertise. Criss has an excellent short primer on the art of triage, and
Wesley has a piece called "Things Are Not What They Seem." Go see what he
means!

>From our regular columnists comes a potpourri of information. Karen Thurlow
offers excellent advice for preparing for the upcoming flu season. In Law
Bytes, Doug Wolfberg asks "Whose Patient Is It Anyway?" EMD Instructor Jose
Estevanell, EMT-P, writes the NAEMD column this month on the skill of
repetitive persistence. John Mateus talks about instructor courses, and John
Becknell offers operations personnel some thoughts about a "zero drop rate."
Don Wetmore gives some excellent tips on how to use time effectively when
you have to wait for something like, say, an airplane flight or emergency
call!

Our categories of Medic Life, Educator's Corner, and Management Matters are
always there to serve you, as are the general columns — take a look! And,
please don't be shy about sending us your Reader Feedback. We always
appreciate your thoughts and ideas. We also enjoy your compliments! We write
back to everyone as promptly as possible.

Welcome to the November 18th release of MERGINET.News!

Warm regards,
Kate Dernocoeur, Editor
Laura Bennett-Kimble, Managing Editor

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New in this issue!

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Feature Articles
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>> Things Aren't Always What They Seem
by Keith Wesley, MD
You respond for a man with a decreased level of consciousness who has fallen
out of bed. On arrival you find him lying beside his bed. His wife tells you
she was awakened by a thud and arose to find her husband on the floor next
to the bed and the nightstand. She thinks he was unconscious but awoke prior
to your arrival.

>> Case Study: Trauma Triage
by Liz Criss
Did you know triage is a French word meaning "to sort out"? In the setting
of prehospital trauma it refers to identifying who is the most severely
injured and will benefit the most from the limited available resources. It
is sometimes easy to identify the most severely injured patients. It is more
challenging to give them a designation and maybe even leave them until last.

>> Patients Say "Thank You"
by Kate Dernocoeur, MERGINET Editor
Now that it's November ("Thanksgiving month"), we here at MERGINET got
thinking: no one in healthcare gets enough "thank you" messages. But people
in emergency medicine get them least of all.

>> The Very First Mediterranean Emergency Medicine Congress
by Dr. Samuel Nkire Mbazuigwe, Poland, with MERGINET Editor, Kate Dernocoeur
The First Mediterranean Emergency Medicine Congress took place in Stresa,
Italy September 2-5, 2001. It was an educational and scientific congress
dedicated solely to the topic of emergency medicine.

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Educators Corner
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>> Instructor Courses — What Do We Need to Know?
by John Mateus
I have always considered instructors to be "my people." I have identified
with them, sympathized with their problems, and in general shared their
concerns and issues. I suppose that it shouldn't surprise me much that my
favorite teaching assignments are instructor courses.


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Columns
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>> Preparing for Another Flu Season
by Karen L. Thurlow, RNC, BSN
Influenza is Italian for "influence," and derives from the Medieval Latin
"influentia." This usage came about because people once thought that the
disease was caused by a bad influence from the heavens.

>> Using Repetitive Persistence
by Lt. Jose Estevanell, EMT-P, EMD Instructor
Repetitive persistence by an EMD has been shown to be the most effective
method of reducing a caller's anxiety to below the hysteria threshold.
Nearly all EMDs agree that the calls in which repetitive persistence is most
necessary are often the most unpleasant to process, and consequently the
calls where it is hardest to use the technique.


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Management Matters
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>> Who Is a Patient? A Commonsense Take on Consent, Refusals, and Negligence
in EMS
by Doug Wolfberg, Esq.
One dictionary defines a patient as "a person who is under medical or
surgical treatment." Black's Law Dictionary similarly defines a patient as
"a person under medical or psychiatric treatment or care." Courts have found
that a person may be a patient when the medical provider attends the person
for the purpose of giving professional aid, even though the person attended
to is unconscious or unaware of the presence of the provider and does not
actually consent or even objects to the treatment.

>> Defeating Delays
by Dr. Donald E. Wetmore
We all encounter delays that keep us from doing what we planned to do. As
the recent tragic events have shown, life is often what happens to you along
the way when you are planning otherwise.

>> For Operations: Create a Zero Drop Rate
by John Becknell
In the present world of sophisticated EMS, where we deal with priority
dispatching, fractile response times, GPS, Palm Pilot data collectors, and
advance deployment strategies, it's easy to overlook the simple stuff like
lifting and carrying patients.

More online!

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MERGINET is a service designed to provide resources, news, education and
fun to the all in EMS, Fire, Rescue and Emergency Medicine. Updated daily.
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