One of my favorite blogs is TS‘s Other people’s emergencies: Random thoughts of an urban paramedic. He’s been a paramedic for Boston EMS for 20-some years and has some excellent stories to tell. People often give him a hard time, but I like to think of TS’s writing not as ranting but as him just telling his side of the story. One of my favorites is It’s All About the Doctor…
EMTs and paramedics save lives. Sometimes they get appropriate credit for this. Often, though, patients and their families can’t think back beyond what happened in the emergency department. Even when someone gets resuscitated in the field, it is the doctor and the nurse and the hospital who get all the praise. In the words of a longtime Calgary paramedic who commented on a previous post: “A lot of people are profuse with their thanks to the doctors and nurses who ‘saved their lives,’ but they forget that without the efforts of the paramedics they wouldn’t have made it to emergency department in a condition that allowed the ER staff to ‘save their life’!”
You can read the rest of the story here.