By Jamie Thompson
EMS1 Senior Editor
DALLAS — EMS providers who are tasked with disaster evacuation response often lack the necessary skills to ensure the operations are carried out successfully, a session at EMS Expo was told Thursday.
“We have never addressed disasters (in EMS),” Warren Porter, director of clinical education at AMR South Region, said.
“What we have seen is that with that lack of institutional knowledge, we don’t know what’s going on.”
The session was told that since Hurricane Katrina, EMS has been increasingly given more roles and responsibilities involving disaster response.
These demands, according to Porter, have not been adequately taught or addressed in EMS education, despite the fact EMS is adaptable and has the response skills needed to deal with these areas.
The audience learned that evacuation triage is “an ongoing and dynamic” process.
“Basically what we are looking for is to move people from harm,” Porter said. “You pick a method, but in the end it has got to be simple — you can’t get too complicated. It needs to be effective, it needs to be repeatable and it needs to be consistent.”
Triage skills are perishable, Porter said, and therefore need to be practiced.
“We often go through and triage one time in our career and think we’ve got it, but it’s just as perishable as if you only get the chance to intubate every five years.
“We don’t think about it as we think it’s just a basic skill; we don’t teach it, we don’t give enough emphasis and so we end up having a problem with it.”
EMS providers often tend to think about the need for effective communications only as it relates to their work with other agencies, the session was told.
“I think we are very good in EMS at teaching people to do skills, but they need to be able to talk, too,” Porter said. “Sometimes it can just be about talking to people and getting them to relax.”
When it comes to communication, EMS providers need to remember the people they are treating, according to Porter.
“We need to tell them what we want and how to do it,” he said. “People are like lemmings — if you give them direction, they will come to you.
“Dealing with mass evacuation in the absence of leadership, people are all over the place doing all kinds of stuff,” he said.
Outlining the basic areas responders need to be aware of, Porter said that there is more to triage then red, yellow, green and black tags.
“Coordinate, coordinate and coordinate again,” he said. “Communication is not just for agencies — think of the people affected.”