How to be a Good Paramedic
- Actually want to help people
- Treat people as you would like to be treated. You will never get a complaint from someone who believes that you’re doing your best for them, but if they get the idea that you really don’t care, or have something more interesting on your mind, they will complain. Like it or not, being a Paramedic means that you’re providing a customer (your patients) a service.
- Do all the diagnostic tests: this means physically measuring the patient’s pulse with your hand, taking a blood-pressure, assessing their GCS, looking at their pupils, measuring their Sp02, monitoring their ECG if they have chest pain, auscultating their lungs if they are SOB, take their temperature and assess the their blood sugar levels. This serves two purposes. Firstly, it makes them feel that you are interested in whatever they have wrong with them (most patient’s probably don’t get this much attention from their GPs). And secondly, after assessing all these things, their problems should be blaringly obvious, or not acute. Either way, you know you’ve done your job.
- Remember, you don’t actually have to be calm, all you have to do is convince the patient that you are calm and that you have seen this and looked after this a hundred times before.
- Check your Ambulance properly at the start of the shift. Without fail, the one thing that you will have need at the next “big job” is the one thing that you forgot to check, and happen to be out of.
- Genuinely be interested (or appear interested) in a patient’s problem. Although some things may appear simple for you, it may be a serious problem for the patient
Australian Paramedic…