ECG Mastery by
Practice, practice, and more practice! This full-color workbook walks you step by step through every aspect of ECG interpretation to develop the pattern recognition skills you need to read ECGs with confidence. 550 full-size, real-life ECG strips, a wealth of exercises, and practice tests help to ensure that you can recognize the subtle findings that distinguish one arrhythmia from another and provide the appropriate care in common clinical or emergency situations. See what reviewers are saying online about the previous edition... Amazing Resource! "I really benefited from all the pages of practice problems."--Amazon Reviewer Five Stars. "Great book with clear explanations."--Amazon Reviewer
Killing Season by
A devastating, empathetic look at the opioid epidemic in the United States, through the eyes of a paramedic on the front lines. [I] set my cardiac monitor down by the young man's head. He is lifeless, his face white with a blue tinge. I apply the defibrillator pads to his hairless chest . . . A week from today, after the young man's brain shows no signs of electrical activity, the medical staff will take the breathing tube out, and with his family gathered by his side, he will pass away at the age of twenty-three. When Peter Canning started work as a paramedic on the streets of Hartford, Connecticut, twenty-five years ago, he believed drug users were victims only of their own character flaws. Although he took care of them, he did not care for them. But as the overdoses escalated, Canning began asking his patients how they had gotten started on their perilous journeys. And while no two tales were the same, their heartrending similarities changed Canning's view and moved him to educate himself about the science of addiction. Armed with that understanding, he began his fight against the stigmatization of users. In Killing Season, we ride along with Canning through the streets of Hartford as he tells stories of opioid overdose from a street-level vantage point. A first responder to hundreds of overdoses throughout the rise of America's epidemic, Canning has seen the impact of prescription painkillers, heroin, and the deadly synthetic opioid fentanyl firsthand. Bringing us into the room (or the car, or the portable toilet) with the victims of this epidemic, Canning explains how he came to favor harm reduction, which advocates for needle exchange, community naloxone, and safe-injection sites. Through the rapid-fire nature of one paramedic's view of addiction and overdose, readers will come to understand more than just the science and misguided policies behind the opioid epidemic. They'll also share in Canning's developing empathy. Stripping away the stigma of addiction through stories that are hard-hitting, poignant, sad, confessional, funny, and overall, human, Killing Season will change minds about the epidemic, help obliterate stigma, and save lives.
Paramedics on and off the streets : emergency medical services in the age of technological governance by
In Paramedics On and Off the Streets, Michael K. Corman embarks on an institutional ethnography of the complex, mundane, intricate, and exhilarating work of paramedics in Calgary, Alberta. Corman's comprehensive research includes more than 200 hours of participant observation ride-alongs with paramedics over a period of eleven months, more than one hundred first hand interviews with paramedics, and thirty-six interviews with other emergency medical personnel including administrators, call-takers and dispatchers, nurses, and doctors.
Rhetorical Work in Emergency Medical Services by
NCTE-CCCC Best Book in Technical or Scientific Communication 2020 Rhetorical Work in Emergency Medical Services: Communicating in the Unpredictable Workplace details how communicators harness the power of rhetoric to make decisions and communicate in unpredictable contexts. Grounded in a 16-month study in the emergency medical services (EMS) workplace, this text contributes to our theoretical, methodological, and practical understandings of the situation-specific processes that communicators and researchers engage in to respond to the urgencies and constraints of high-stakes workplaces. This book presents these intricate processes and skills--learned and innate--that workplace communicators use to accomplish goal-directed activity, collaborate with other communicators, and complete and teach workplace writing.
Master the EMT Certification Exam by 
Ambulance Services by
This volume provides fresh insights and management understanding of the changing role of the ambulance services against the backdrop of massive cuts in health budgets around the world and the changing context of pre-hospital care within the wider healthcare networks. The challenges of funding, training and cultural transformation are now felt globally. The need to learn and adapt from suitable models of ambulance service delivery have never been greater. The book offers critical insights into the theory and practice of strategic and operational management of ambulance services and the leadership needs for the service. One of the highlight of this volume is to bring together scholarship using experts- academics, practitioners and professionals in the field, to each of the chosen topics. The chapters are based in the practical experiences of the authors and are written in a way that is accessible and suitable for a range of audiences. We are confident that this book will cater to a wider audience to inform policy and practice, both in the UK and internationally. Paresh Wankhade is Professor of Leadership and Management at Edge Hill University, UK Kevin Mackway-Jones is the Medical Director at North West Ambulance Service NHS Trust, UK Endorsements "This unique and valuable publication, charts the history and development of the ambulance service in England over the last hundred years or so. The role of this key emergency service has always been important, and arguably never more so than today. The contributing authors have not only provided the reader with great insights into where the service has come from and the leadership challenges it has, and continues to face; it also gives examples of how the future could look as our journey of transformation continues." Peter Bradley CBE, MBA (and author of Taking Healthcare to the Patient 2005), Chief Executive Officer. St John National Headquarters, New Zealand "With a year on year increase in demand for emergency ambulances and over 9 million calls annually, the UK Ambulance Service must change from its emergency care and transport focus model. With the increase in professionalism of paramedics and an uplift in assessment and clinical skills the modern paramedic is increasingly able to treat at home, direct patients with alternative care pathways and avoid transportation to overburdened Emergency Departments. Whilst there is some historical and cultural resistance to change there is a need for further development in clinical skills and a new perspective for the future Ambulance Service. This book brings together practitioners, managers, academics and provides a broad understanding of the major management issues in the UK Ambulance Service. It includes the history of the Ambulance Service, quality and risk management issues, commissioning, leadership, intra-operability and shape of the future ambulance service. The content will be of interest to students, practitioners and academics". Sir Keith Porter, Professor of Clinical Traumatology, University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, United Kingdom
Emergency Birth in the Community by 
Emergency Medical Services by
The two-volume Emergency Medical Services: Clinical Practice and Systems Oversight delivers a thorough foundation upon which to succeed as an EMS medical director and prepare for the NAEMSP National EMS Medical Directors Course and Practicum. Focusing on EMS in the 'real world', the book offers specific management tools that will be useful in the reader's own local EMS system and provides contextual understanding of how EMS functions within the broader emergency care system at a state, local, and national level. The two volumes offer the core knowledge trainees will need to successfully complete their training and begin their career as EMS physicians, regardless of the EMS systems in use in their areas. A companion website rounds out the book's offerings with audio and video clips of EMS best practice in action. Readers will also benefit from the inclusion of: A thorough introduction to the history of EMS An exploration of EMS airway management, including procedures and challenges, as well as how to manage ventilation, oxygenation, and breathing in patients, including cases of respiratory distress Practical discussions of medical problems, including the challenges posed by the undifferentiated patient, altered mental status, cardiac arrest and dysrhythmias, seizures, stroke, and allergic reactions An examination of EMS systems, structure, and leadership
Talking Trauma by
"Man, I've seen, believe it or not, a head-on accident in the parking lot of a Macy's sale. What do they have, those white sales, is that what they have? The parking lot was completely barren except these two cars that hit each other head on. This little old lady and some other idiot. How do you do that?! A barren parking lot! Completely empty, morning, nobody there, and somehow they managed to hit each other head on. Well, it was just enough trauma to kill her, you know? Barely any damage but, you know, a little old lady driving a big car, a big old gnarly steering wheel and that's enough to kill an elderly person and stuff ." As they race to and from emergency calls, as they wait and watch, and as they administer aid to the traumatized, paramedics tell stories. Their tales disclose much about how they view their own profession. Their duties are much more complex than the dramatic portrayals that reach the living room via the television screen. This book reports what really goes on behind the scenes. The reader of Talking Trauma has a virtual front seat in the ambulance. Here the focus is not on the mechanics of the job but rather on paramedics' work culture and their well-established storytelling tradition. The stories they tell are cynical, flip, and profane--the very antithesis of "heroic" in the romantic sense. Their narratives evince an "anti-epic" quality that intentionally trivializes the conventional immensities of pain and horror. Paramedics present the gothic as "business as usual," and mainly their stories are intended only for the ears of other paramedics. Their stories afford a shocking glimpse into a chaotic urban underworld where prostitution, drug abuse, assault, and murder are daily fare. Outsiders may expect their tales to be only about horrific mutilation and death. However compelling such topics may be to the layperson, the actual repertory is most often commentary on personal experience and revelation of the "why" behind the stories paramedics tell. Talking Trauma provides an intimate look into a work culture deliberately kept hidden from public view. It is not centered on individuals the public may stereotype as streetwise, hardened caregivers but upon the stories of self-presentation by which paramedics structure past events to fit into their identity. This fascinating book reveals how storytelling equips these professionals to exert control over chaos and to withstand encounters with suffering, death, and mayhem on a daily basis. At the University of California, Los Angeles, Timothy R. Tangherlini is an assistant professor in the Scandinavian Section and affiliated with the Folklore and Mythology Program.