Do You Have Any Idea How Expensive Your Laziness Is?!
BAD BEHAVIOR, EMERGENCY SERVICES, LAZY/UNHELPFUL, NEW JERSEY, PATIENTS, USA | HEALTHY | NOVEMBER 10, 2020
I volunteer for my township’s all-volunteer first aid squad. We have a designated crew manning the building during the day to answer any calls, but overnight, the designated crew responds from home via pager. My town and surrounding towns are not very big, so we or other towns sometimes have difficulty putting a crew together. For this reason, we have a “mutual aid” agreement with nearby towns. If we do not have a crew available, another town offers their crew, and vice versa.
Many people misuse the 911 system. They think that arriving at an emergency room by ambulance will mean faster service. It does not. I have literally been to a house in the middle of the night for a stubbed toe. There were four cars in the driveway and five people in the house, any one of whom could have driven the “patient” to the hospital… for the stubbed toe.
On one night shift, my pager goes off to respond to the next town over, which also happens to have the hospital that we take most of our patients to. Bleary-eyed, I drive to my building, meet up with my crew, grab an ambulance, set the GPS, and go off on our way.
Dispatch: “The patient is experiencing urinary retention.”
This can be very painful and dangerous to the kidneys.
And where was the house we ended up at? Across the street from the hospital emergency room entrance. And where was the patient? Sitting on his front porch with a packed bag and quietly reading a book. And how long had it been since he had passed urine? About three hours. Grrrrr!
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