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In this week’s Inside EMS podcast, host Chris Cebollero and Kelly Grayson discuss why airline employees didn’t use an AED on a man having a heart attack because his chest was too hairy.
“This smacks of just poor training all around,” Grayson said.
They also explore models for ambulance billing outsourcing in light of a Mo. initiative, and highlight a new, experimental heart failure drug that shows great promise, and is expected to be on the market by 2015.
“They actually stopped the trial early because it was so much, clearly better than ACE inhibitors alone,” Grayson said.
Cebollero also questioned why it’s taken so long to make this discovery.
Why wasn’t this found five years ago?” he asked. It’s an indication, he said, of how quickly the medical field is evolving, and how much we still have to learn.
“It just goes to show that there’s so much more that can happen in medicine that we’re not even to the pinnacle, I think, of what we do,” Cebollero said.
In The Clinical Issue, they tackle the need for improvements to clinical education, especially when it comes to handling pediatric patients.
“When we deal with sick kids, it’s that infrequency in the amount of time we spend preparing to take care of this special population that really leads to the trepidation of how we deal with pediatric patients,” Cebollero said.
Grayson said there needs to be better pediatric education, but it’s a challenge to find quality classes that are affordable. Cebollero argues that although children aren’t considered ‘little adults,’ the approach isn’t all that different.
Grayson disagreed.
“You have to work from a different mindset,” he said.
Handling calls involving children requires different tools, including the Handtevy pediatric system — a complete, portable pediatric resuscitation and drug dosing system that allows healthcare providers to run a pediatric code from start to finish.
Grayson also talks about a group called Kilted to Kick Cancer, a group that looks to bring awareness to prostate cancer in men.
Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned on the show:
