It's been a little over a week since my last posting. I'll try to make this a good one.
The new work schedule started a week ago Monday. For the record, it was a mistake for me to pick it up. While I'm not working any 24 hour tours, My overnight's are all lumped together. For example, I worked overnight last night in Goffstown and I am working tonight on ALS-2. In principle that doesn't sound terrible, but inevitable what's happened is that I've ended up being sleep deprived. Hopefully tonight won't be a busy one, especially because I have to go to court tomorrow morning at the end of the tour. All I can hope for is that we don't get the snot kicked out of us.
Finally - the snow is starting to break down up here. We have considerable melt going on. The temperature out on my porch is 47 degrees F, and the driveway is actually a little bit soggy. A lot of people up here are really worried about this, though, as over the past two years we've had major flooding in the state and it has been terrible for all of the people who've been affected by them. The people who've had the most trouble are those who own waterfront property, mostly on the banks of the rivers and on lakefronts. The few who own ocean front property have also had problems - there has been significant beach erosion as well as high seas with bad weather, and the amount of property damage has been simply staggering. It makes me very thankful that I live on a hill; my house sits at about 400 feet above sea level, and I am blessed with a view that points towards one of the three small mountains we have in the area, Mount Uncannoonuc. It is really not more than a big hill that tops out at about 1300 feet, but it's what is here.
This is what the summit looks like at sunset. I found this on Webshots, and I have to give due credit to the person who took this picture, so rather than being copied it is embedded from their page. It looks like this picture was taken from the Goffstown Back Road near the north side of the Briggs power station, but I can't be sure. If I can get a good picture from here, I will post it. But just the same, the colors are awesome, and it is an overall good look at the mountain. I like this.
A lot going on at work. The whole compliance training fiasco is done. Our education coordinator, EK, and our clinical director, DL, worked hard to pull it together. I have to give them big kudos for doing such a good job with an item as difficult to deal with as this. Certainly it wasn't easy for them do put it all together as they had to deal with the compliance officer at St. Joseph Hospital as well as the people from the OIG. And, for the record, although I haven't forgotten what I was personally put through because of it, I'm over it and I won't say more.
We are getting new ventilators and upgrades to all of our Life-Pak 12 monitor/defibrillators. The majority of them are equipped with standard 4-lead monitoring as well as 12-lead capability. Some of them, specifically those on the transfer trucks, are outfitted with BP cuffs and pulse oximetry. My understanding is that all of the units are being outfitted with those items plus end-tidal CO2 capability, and the transfer trucks are getting docking stands so as not to wreck batteries. Plus we are going paperless on April 14, and we are getting training on the software we're going to use. It's Zoll's LifeNet software, which I'm not familiar with, but it is supposed to be somewhat better than TEMSIS, which is what most of the services in the state use for electronic reports. This is all part of the compliance program, and my personal opinion is that if we didn't have to do it we'd still be using paper reports. But not only are we under the gun with the OIG, but we are also behind the curve with the state, as I believe all EMS agencies in New Hampshire we supposed be using electronic reporting be January 1st of this year. I don't know why there has been no fallout, but I can only speculate that it's because we've gotten some sort of extension or something like that to deal with the compliance issues.
My new NH license showed up in today's mail. So I'm good for another two years up here. That makes me happy; having the new card in my hand enables me to actually send in what I need to so that I can get an appointment to test in Massachusetts. I'm considering going down there for a couple of reasons, mostly because the pay is better. Although it's a commute, depending on where I could end up going, I would make the best of it. But there are things to think about with this that I'm sure I haven't discovered yet.
One last thing I wanted to share: a friend of mine forwarded the following video to me yesterday. After watching it, I'm feeling compelled to post it.....
The new work schedule started a week ago Monday. For the record, it was a mistake for me to pick it up. While I'm not working any 24 hour tours, My overnight's are all lumped together. For example, I worked overnight last night in Goffstown and I am working tonight on ALS-2. In principle that doesn't sound terrible, but inevitable what's happened is that I've ended up being sleep deprived. Hopefully tonight won't be a busy one, especially because I have to go to court tomorrow morning at the end of the tour. All I can hope for is that we don't get the snot kicked out of us.
Finally - the snow is starting to break down up here. We have considerable melt going on. The temperature out on my porch is 47 degrees F, and the driveway is actually a little bit soggy. A lot of people up here are really worried about this, though, as over the past two years we've had major flooding in the state and it has been terrible for all of the people who've been affected by them. The people who've had the most trouble are those who own waterfront property, mostly on the banks of the rivers and on lakefronts. The few who own ocean front property have also had problems - there has been significant beach erosion as well as high seas with bad weather, and the amount of property damage has been simply staggering. It makes me very thankful that I live on a hill; my house sits at about 400 feet above sea level, and I am blessed with a view that points towards one of the three small mountains we have in the area, Mount Uncannoonuc. It is really not more than a big hill that tops out at about 1300 feet, but it's what is here.
This is what the summit looks like at sunset. I found this on Webshots, and I have to give due credit to the person who took this picture, so rather than being copied it is embedded from their page. It looks like this picture was taken from the Goffstown Back Road near the north side of the Briggs power station, but I can't be sure. If I can get a good picture from here, I will post it. But just the same, the colors are awesome, and it is an overall good look at the mountain. I like this.
A lot going on at work. The whole compliance training fiasco is done. Our education coordinator, EK, and our clinical director, DL, worked hard to pull it together. I have to give them big kudos for doing such a good job with an item as difficult to deal with as this. Certainly it wasn't easy for them do put it all together as they had to deal with the compliance officer at St. Joseph Hospital as well as the people from the OIG. And, for the record, although I haven't forgotten what I was personally put through because of it, I'm over it and I won't say more.
We are getting new ventilators and upgrades to all of our Life-Pak 12 monitor/defibrillators. The majority of them are equipped with standard 4-lead monitoring as well as 12-lead capability. Some of them, specifically those on the transfer trucks, are outfitted with BP cuffs and pulse oximetry. My understanding is that all of the units are being outfitted with those items plus end-tidal CO2 capability, and the transfer trucks are getting docking stands so as not to wreck batteries. Plus we are going paperless on April 14, and we are getting training on the software we're going to use. It's Zoll's LifeNet software, which I'm not familiar with, but it is supposed to be somewhat better than TEMSIS, which is what most of the services in the state use for electronic reports. This is all part of the compliance program, and my personal opinion is that if we didn't have to do it we'd still be using paper reports. But not only are we under the gun with the OIG, but we are also behind the curve with the state, as I believe all EMS agencies in New Hampshire we supposed be using electronic reporting be January 1st of this year. I don't know why there has been no fallout, but I can only speculate that it's because we've gotten some sort of extension or something like that to deal with the compliance issues.
My new NH license showed up in today's mail. So I'm good for another two years up here. That makes me happy; having the new card in my hand enables me to actually send in what I need to so that I can get an appointment to test in Massachusetts. I'm considering going down there for a couple of reasons, mostly because the pay is better. Although it's a commute, depending on where I could end up going, I would make the best of it. But there are things to think about with this that I'm sure I haven't discovered yet.
One last thing I wanted to share: a friend of mine forwarded the following video to me yesterday. After watching it, I'm feeling compelled to post it.....
1 comment:
The City of Cincinnati uses Zoll LifeNet for much of their EMS reporting. While not the greatest software in the world, it is certainly far from the worst. Alot of the field based reporting solutions for Fire/EMS are not user friendly, the Zool products (LifeNet and FireRMS) are some of the best though. You all shouldn't have too much trouble with it.
Great video!
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