By Jessica McCarthy
The News Herald
PANAMA CITY BEACH — Eighteen emergency medical services workers gathered Thursday for a self-defense workshop and they all shared something in common: Every one of them had been attacked on the job during the past year.
“The dirty little secret of EMS, emergency medical services, is that paramedics and EMTs are being assaulted at alarming rates,” said Matt Lopez, EMS coordinator for Gulf Coast Medical Center.
Lopez said health-care workers are 30 times more likely to be assaulted on the job as a police officer or correctional officers, according to U.S. Department of Labor statistics. He said they don’t normally receive training on how to deal with those violent situations.
“We’ve made it our goal to empower our pre-hospital providers to prevent one person, patient or provider from being the next statistic and a victim of assault,” Lopez said.
They’re doing that through a program called Escaping a Violent Encounter (EVE), which was designed specifically for health-care workers. The program was presented at Christ Our Savior Lutheran Church in Panama City Beach.
EVE was founded by Kip Teitsort, a former police officer and part-time paramedic in Missouri, after the ambulance in which he was working was carjacked. He said the attacker was charged with light crimes, especially considering the carjacking included kidnapping three people, and it was frustrating.
“It’s like no one cared because we were paramedics,” Teitsort said.
EVE does teach defensive maneuvers, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It also includes document preparation, how and why to report the situation, verbal de-escalation and more.
“If you have to use hands at all to escape a situation, you’ve failed many other steps along the way,” Lopez said. “Identifying and having a situational awareness of what’s going on in the first place is key.”
Part of that training is called the ladder, six steps to escape. Lopez said the top of the ladder begins with not being on an unsafe scene, including knowing the signs a person can show before becoming the attacker, and goes all the way down to what’s called escaping the mount.
He also said if a situation becomes violent, the program provides ways to get out of what’s happening and work back up to the top of the ladder to escape. The other steps include awareness, maintaining distance, maneuvers for protection and basic ground defense.
Lopez said all 18 people in the EVE classes Wednesday and Thursday had been assaulted on the job within the last year. Holmes County EMS paramedic Ted Burdeshaw said he wished he had this training before the attack.
“It’s all been beneficial and how one thing ties in to the other to be able to make something work,” Burdeshaw said. “The smallest person can take the biggest person to the ground so they can get out of the situation.”
He also said when he gets back to work, he will share what he learned with his co-workers and encourage them to go through the EVE program.
“We’re not trying to fight anybody; we don’t have the Tasers and all that,” Burdeshaw said. “We’re just trained to help people who need help. For a long time we were taught violence was an occupational hazard, and it’s not. We have the right to be trained to get out of a bad situation.”
Lopez said it’s about protecting one another.
“We’ve made it our job to try and empower; empowerment equals safety as far as I’m concerned,” Lopez said. “We want our responders to take care of us; we have to empower them to take care of themselves.”
Reprinted with the permission of The News Herald