From Penn State Health, this is Ask Us Anything About... Emergency Medical
Services. I'm Scott Gilbert. There are steps everyone can do to help EMS crews
do their life-saving job this involves clearing the way when emergency vehicles
are approaching and making it easier for them to find your home. As September is
National Preparedness Month, we thought it was a good time to check in with
Scott Buchle. He's program manager for Penn State Health lifeline EMS and he's
here to answer some of my questions and your questions today. Just add them to the
comment field here below this post and we'll be sure to pose them to Scott.
Hey, Scott! First of all, thanks a lot for being here. My Pleasure. I'd like to ask you a bit
about, it's a bit of a traffic question I guess. If I'm driving down the highway or
maybe in a city and I see an ambulance coming up behind me, what are the steps I
should take? How can I be safe as a driver but also make make way for the
ambulance? Sure. The first thing to do is do not panic. Whether it's a fire truck,
an ambulance, a police car, a lot of times people will panic break right in front
of the emergency vehicle. Okay. The other thing is do not directly stop
in front of the emergency vehicle because then what happens is, the
emergency vehicle has to serpentine around all the other cars that are
stopped. So, is the idea to make way or is it to just stop to let them go around. The idea
is to yield to the emergency vehicle if you have room to get off to
the right side of the road. Pull to the right, that's the law in the Commonwealth.
A lot of people or some people will pull to the left which again makes it more of a
serpentine for the emergency vehicle. If you're driving a big firetruck that's
kind of a problem. So ambulance, police, car, fire truck, whatever pull to the
right, do not panic and leave as much room as possible. If you're in a
situation where you do not have room to pull to the right, try and get over as
best you can. A lot of times, we see people at intersections where it's a red
light and they don't have room to move so it'll happen is people will start to
slowly parked their cars to make room for the ambulance or worst case scenario,
we have to wait till the light turns green and then proceed through. Sounds
like some common sense pretty much? Correct. Correct. Yes. Good deal. Let's say I'm the
person who called 911 I requested the ambulance, what are some things I can do to help
the ambulance find my home? I've heard things like leaving a light on outside,
making sure you have a prominently displayed house number. Are those things
helpful? Absolutely! Those are two the biggest items. The light on especially at
night. If possible, if somebody can go out and help flag the ambulance down, that
would be great. The biggest thing is just numbering on your house or wherever your
business or wherever you're living. We run into a lot of complexes or apartment
complexes, town homes and so forth, where the numbers are very obscure. They might
be hidden by vegetation or they're just too small to read. So the bigger the
number the better. We have GPS tracking and all the
vehicles so we're pretty precise at finding your home but no system is
absolutely perfect. So I think the large numbers is the biggest help. Lights at
night and again if somebody can go outside and help flag the ambulance down,
that's best. You're watching Ask Us Anything About...
Emergency Medical Services from Penn State Health. Thanks for tuning in for
this Facebook live video. I'm Scott Gilbert alongside, Scott Buchle.
He's program manager for Penn State Health Life Lion EMS. We welcome your
questions, whether you're watching this video live or if you're watching it on
playback. Just add them as comments in the comment field below this Facebook
post and we'll make sure we track down some answers for you. You know Scott,
once the EMS crew arrives at the home, what are some tips there, for kind of
helping them do their job? For example, if I have pets, I imagine that could be a
factor? Absolutely. Pets have a tendency to be a problem for EMS crews when they
come to a house. A lot of people think that the bigger pets, big dogs or more
ferocious, that can be. In our experience, an my own personally as well, I think the
little dogs are more ferocious. Is that right? Absolutely! Yes, they are very fierce
sometimes but the thing is we don't want to hurt the pets so with the smaller
animals we don't want to step on them. We're bringing equipment in with us so
we don't want to have the smaller animals get injured. The bigger animals,
you know, they have a tendency... Animals are smart. They know when someone
is sick. So sometimes, they will park themselves beside the patient. They don't
really want to move. So if you can take your pets and put them in
another room, outside and you know, backyard or wherever so they're not in
the way, that's the biggest help. The next thing to do is make sure we have room to
get into a patient. Sometimes, that might require moving some furniture EMS crews
sometimes will move furniture to make way for the ambulance cot to come
inside and so we can extricate the patient. Sometimes we will also call the
fire department to come out and help us with extrication of a patient out of the
building. Whether it be moving furniture, just helping
to carry the patient. Again, so that's more importance to make room and
get your animals out of the way. Often when we go to the doctor's office we're
told to have medications ready to show to the doctor. And when there's an
ambulance coming to your house, same advice applies? Absolutely. Yes, it is part
of this job sometimes playing detective. We have people who will go for a 9-1-1
call and we will get handed a several bottles. Several bottles of medication
and we have to take the time to write those down to take that list along to
the hospital with us. We really don't want to take the medications to the
hospital. Just for fear they might get lost or separated from the patient.
There's a lot of money in those pharmaceuticals so we don't want them to
get lost. So our recommendation is, everybody, regardless if you take one
medication or if you take one hundred medications should have a list written
down of what you take, how often you take it and what the dosage is and who the
physician is who prescribed it. A lot of times people have several physicians who
prescribe different medications, so again, that makes our jobs easier and also the
nurses and doctors here at the emergency department and also throughout the
health system as they're trying to piece together what might be wrong with a
patient, what the reason is for certain medication, who prescribed it. Let's talk
a little bit about the different types of ambulance crews they could show up at
a home based on the type of call. We hear about BLS. Basic Life Support. ALS for
Advanced Life Support. This type of vehicle here is this is? This is technically
a mobile intensive care unit it can do the duties of a basic life support unit
as well. To qualify is an ALS unit you have a paramedic on board and you
have advanced life support equipment. All of our ambulances are dual role and
the difference between the two is, a basic life support ambulance is staffed
by two emergency medical technicians, they have an AED, an Automated External
Defibrillator, they do not have a medication bag, that would come with a
paramedic. The difference is in the skill set of the providers
between an EMT and a paramedic. So, the paramedics would have the heart monitor,
they would be doing the IVs, they would be doing
the advanced airway skills, carrying more medications. So that's pretty much the
difference between the two. So a cardiac arrest or a life-threatening situation
will call for ALS? Correct. Now, in some situations, you may get both units
depending on how a municipality is structured. For most of the areas that
Life Lion EMS serves as a 9-1-1 coverage we provide sole service where as one of
our units, one of our ALS units, will respond. There are some other areas where
we work with neighboring BLS units. So this ambulance would bring the paramedic
any equipment where one of our ALS squads would come with the paramedic and
equipment and then they would jump on that BLS unit and take the patient to
the hospital. Now you did touch on briefly the difference between EMTs and
paramedics, can you explain that a little more in depth just so people may hear the
terms and think that are interchangeable? But that's actually not the case.
Sure, the difference is basically skill set in education. Both of them are
certified through the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. An emergency medical
technician goes to school for roughly about three months. They have a certain
skill set.... There's also... Do you hear something or is it just me?
I think it's our big cousins down the hall coming to visit us! So what
you're hearing right now is a Life Lion critical care helicopter. It's literally
landing right behind us and I hope you can still hear us. But it's landing
right behind us at the landing pad which is just outside the emergency department
here at the Medical Center. So that's what you're hearing right now is one of
our Life Lion helicopters landing. An air ambulance if you will and I think that
sound will be subsiding here very shortly. But yeah, so an interesting
distinction there between the EMTs and paramedics I know they have both of
those on board the helicopter too and should interesting. So the
EMTs and paramedics again, the difference is the EMTs basic life support. There's
also a new certification in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania called
advanced EMT. It's kind of a bridge between the EMT and the paramedic level.
A paramedic program, paramedics will go to school for roughly about a year and a
half to two years. It's pretty much an associate's degree level program it has
more clinical time involved that they get into more of Cardiology
interpretation, advanced airway skills, medication. And then furthermore is the
critical care transport mode, i.e. the helicopter which just landed. Our
critical care transport team is staffed with paramedics and also critical care
nurses. And obviously, the nurse goes to school for their amount of time so many
years they get their nursing degree. Also, to work on a critical care team they
have to have a certain amount of years experience in an ICU or in the emergency
department at doing nursing level care to get to that transport team level.
A lot of different levels of care available each cater to whatever the
call in particular is all about makes good sense. Like I was saying
earlier, we welcome your questions for Scott Buchle, he's program manager of
Penn State Health Life Lion EMS and we do have a common here from Tim. He says,
Thank You Penn State EMS. I have intractable epilepsy and I'm blind. I
appreciate your videos. I have a medical alert bracelet and a vagus nerve
stimulator card. Well, thank you, Tim. Thanks a lot for your comment. We
appreciate you tuning in for this video. We appreciate everybody's
comments and questions. Feel free to leave those in the comment field. Again, below
this video. Can we talk a bit about skills people might be able to learn at
home so that they can help a friend or a family member until help arrives? I'm
thinking of things like, CPR. Absolutely. CPR we recommend everybody can do CPR
from pretty much any age group at this point. Children, not really little kids
but I know of some kids in the eight-year-old range you have learned
CPR done and successfully. We recommend that for everybody. In addition to the
CPR is basic first aid. How to control bleeding, sudden bleeding, or severe
bleeding which will help save a life until EMS gets there.
A lot of important skills there and where can people learn those
types of skills? I guess they could probably contact, I know the
Medical Center offers classes and that type of thing from time to time but any
advice for people on that? Yeah, absolutely. You can pretty much
find community CPR classes at various locations. Local fire department, EMS
services offer them, we offer them through our resuscitation Sciences
Institute here at the Penn State Hershey Medical Center.
Also, sometimes municipalities will offer those as community courses and the other
thing too is reach out to local community colleges here in the
Harrisburg area. We have Harrisburg Area Community College for example, they offer
community CPR courses as well. You can contact the Red Cross the American Heart
Association they can put you in touch with local CPR classes they're being
held. Especially important to know those skills perhaps if somebody in your home
has special medical needs. And I'm wondering also, is it important to
register or at least notify crews in advance before a call happens?Just to
let them know that somebody has special needs perhaps that they are on oxygen or
have some sort of medical condition? Again, prior to any call taking place.
Just as an FYI. That is good information to have. A lot of times and
that's something that used to be very very prominent a long time ago before a
majority of the state went to an advanced 9-1-1 system. I'll talk
about that in a second. If you have a medical condition, it is not a bad idea
to give that information to your local EMS provider. The challenge though is, if
your local EMS service is tied up on another call, the 9-1-1 center will
dispatch the next neighboring appropriate unit to your call. The 9-1-1
centers are very skilled at asking information when a call comes in. So
they'll be quick to get that information. The other thing too is that a lot of
people, talking about the 9-1-1 system, a lot of people think that when they call
9-1-1 there is a delay because the 9-1-1 operator is on the phone with them for a
certain amount of time. They are asked as they're asking informations they're
typing it into the computer and they're sending it down the line to another
dispatcher who's actually talking to the ambulance, police car, fire truck that's
coming to your house. So that dispatch happens immediately even as they're
gathering additional information and when it comes to that 9-1-1 call. Any
other advice for people to keep in mind when they're calling 9-1-1?
Some mistakes maybe people make. I know one is, sometimes people hang up too .soon
Absolutely. Pretty much in any area, service by life Lion EMS and throughout
all of central Pennsylvania, it's an advanced 9-1-1 system. So as soon as they
pick up the phone, they pretty much can see who the caller is and their
information. There's still some cellular phone limitations out there that's being
worked through. It's a lot better than what it was but we do run into people
who in a panic they will call and say hey I need an ambulance and a hang-up.
And then, the 9-1-1 dispatcher has to call back and figure out what the end
for me or what specifically is wrong to send the most appropriate ambulance. So
the big thing is to stay calm, have patience with them and again, you know
the dispatcher is gonna ask you several questions. They're gonna triage the call,
they're gonna send the most appropriate unit and make sure that they have
the right address. You're watching, Ask Us to Anything About...
Emergency Medical Services from Penn State Health. I'm Scott Gilbert alongside
Scott Buchle, he's program manager for Penn State Health Life Lion EMS and he's
here to answer your questions as well as mine. So feel free to leave those
questions in the comment field below this Facebook post even if you're
watching it after it's live. If you're watching it on playback, we can still
track down some answers for yo. You know, we mentioned earlier Scott that September
is National Preparedness Month and I don't want to let you go without the
opportunity for you to share some tips on how people can be prepared. I do know,
that at www.PennStateHealthNews.org, our online newsroom, the Medical Minute from
last week shares some important information, including some quotes from
Scott Buchle and we'll make sure we share that quote with you. Or, the link to
that rather in this Facebook post. But in addition to that any
other important tips for preparation? Especially as we see some of these
disasters happening like floods and hurricanes in other parts of the country?
The big thing is to have a plan. Prepare early and the one thing that we try to
tell people too is in today's day and age I think people need to be
self-sufficient for 48 to 72 hours. The biggest thing is people don't plan for
for a disaster. Simple stuff like food and water, batteries for flashlights.
Everybody has a cellphone but what happens if the power's out for three
days and now your cell phone battery dies?
So have a have a way to recharge your cell phone. The other thing too is know
your evacuation routes. Know if you have to leave your home suddenly or your
office, where are you going? Where would you go to and then once you have that
plan communicate that with your loved ones and your family. One of the other
challenges in a disaster is reunification. Families get split up and
then obviously the communication systems are either stretched thin or damaged to
the point that there's no communications. Now families have a very difficult time
reuniting with each other. The biggest piece of advice we give people in
disaster situation is use your head and don't make a simple problem a big
problem. I use flash flooding for as an example. A lot of people think that if
there's a flooded road they can drive right through it and that's, you know, a
simple solution of just turn around and go the other way.
But what happens is, they drive out in the middle now the water is up to their
windshield and Fire Department, EMS have to come and we have to rescue you. Now you're
putting you know yourself at risk obviously but also the rescuers are at
risk as well. With the situations we see down in Texas and down in Florida,
people have to understand too that the the first responder system is designed
to handle a set number of emergencies in any given community on an average day.
All right, so there's not an ambulance or a fire truck or police car for every
single citizen, should they need it all at once. So that's where we see
challenges in a situation like down in Florida and Texas where not everybody
had you know there were people who were waiting for a while for ambulances and
you know, helped to get there because the emergency responder
system is so stretched thin that we were backlogged in calls it takes hours and
sometimes days to get to them. So that's where the self sufficiency comes in and
be prepared for those emergencies. If you have to relocate we go back to the
medications. Have your medical history with you your medications and so
forth all written down so if you have to go to a shelter, somebody there can help
you get the medications you need and help you with any type of medical care
that you might need long-term. It's all very good advice. Especially because
there's we're no strangers to flooding, flash flooding, some winter storms, so as
we head into the winter. I know it's in the 80s this week but soon it's going to
be snowing believe it or not and so it's always good to be to be mindful of those
tips. It's hot out here today but it'll be cold in two
weeks probably! I won't be sweating like this in two weeks. Exactly! And like I mentioned,
we have a medical minute at www.PennStateHealthNews.org from just last week.
So make sure you go online and check that out for additional tips on how to
prepare for an emergency, including how to compile an emergency kit that you can
keep in your home or car. Scott Buchle, he is program manager for our Penn State
Life Lion EMS. Thanks so much for your time today. My pleasure. We really appreciate the
information and again feel free to post your questions if you have some that we
didn't answer. And thank you very much for watching, Ask Us Anything About...
Emergency Medical Services from Penn State Health.