I love prehospital care. Emergency, NET, wilderness, critical, community, flight, ground, I love it all. I live and breathe it and always have. But some nights I just want to quit. It's not the patients, scenes, or calls. It's not nightmares or PTSD. It's not yet another drunk or threat or 911-for-a-stubbed-toe.
It's bureaucracy, the illusion of knowledge, disrespect, and inefficiencies within the EMS system. And mostly it's plain economics that result from those things. I'm putting up with this junk for how much?
Over the last 21 years, I've seen EMS change in myriad ways—changes that make me proud and my mind giddy. But today I've been reminded of the many areas where we have not grown. Oh, we think we've grown, but in reality we have only entrenched sparkly new systems that fail to address key issues, crunch meaningless numbers, or give a mere appearance of progress while quadrupling the time and trouble of overworked and underpaid employees. This is the best we have? This is all we have to show?
I'll be fine. I'll drink some tea and bury myself in a nice journal article and pretend the world makes sense.
Just as soon as I finish this pile of paperwork.
