Why these doctors are learning from paramedics
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Why these doctors are learning from paramedics
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Narrated by:
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Summary
Dolly McPherson is an aeromedical paramedic with the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Air Ambulance (UK). Her normal shift involves a helicopter, a doctor, advanced airway and trauma equipment and closed-loop communication rehearsed to the point of instinct. When something goes wrong, she has everything she needs within arm’s reach.
In Mongolia, she has her hands and whatever the team can improvise.
In this conversation, Dolly reflects on what it means to teach emergency care fundamentals to doctors whose clinical knowledge is exceptional but whose prehospital environment offers almost nothing to work with - no heated blankets in minus 40 degrees, no oxygen saturation monitors when batteries die in the cold, no protocols for safely leaving a patient at home when 75% of calls end exactly that way.
But the more searching questions run the other direction. What does it mean that a flight paramedic from the UK is teaching doctors emergency medicine and learning something back? What does Mongolian ingenuity look like when the equipment fails and the patient still needs help? And what does a system built on doing the basics exceptionally well have to teach well-resourced EMS?
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