| 4/28/2015 12:47:00 PM Slice of life: Williams area Life Line ambulance | |||
WILLIAMS, Ariz. - The Williams News staff recently sat down with Life Line ambulance employees Tiffany Kimmerle and Sandy Stevens to find out what a typical day is like on the job. How long have you been working here? TK: I've been with Life Line for just over 10 years now, and I've been working here in the Williams area for about four years now. How did you get into this line of work? TK: I was in college and I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do, and everything pretty much revolved around EMS, so I decided to take the EMT class and passed that and I was able to get a job doing that here at Life Line. And then after working here as an EMT for a few years I decided I wanted to become a paramedic, so I took a class for that and became a paramedic. EMTs are just a basic life support type of job where they can take vitals and just basic patient care. They usually are driving when the paramedic is in the back of the truck. The paramedic is able to do more advanced skills like starting an IV or intubating a patient or giving medication. What areas does this office cover? TK: It goes all the way from the west of I-40 at mile marker 107 all the way to the east on I-40 to mile marker 179. Then we go as far north as south of the Grand Canyon, usually around the Valle area. We go all the way south to just north of Paulden right there by Perkinsville. How many people work out of this office? TK: There are two crews every day. There's 5101. They start at 7:00 and they're a 24-hour truck and so they get off at 7:00 the next morning. And then there's 5102. They're also a 24-hour truck and they start at 8:00 and then get off at 8:00 the next morning. It's one EMT and one paramedic per truck. Of course if we're both busy on calls then they'll send another unit up from Chino Valley who will come and cover this area while we're on our calls in case another call kicks out. How many calls do you average per day? TK: It definitely varies. We could run no calls, which doesn't happen too often, to eight or 10 calls a day. Average I'd say is maybe four a day. What is the most common call you receive? TK: Usually it's medical, probably trouble breathing or chest pain, things like that. Is there a range of medical services you can provide when responding to a call? TK: We work under a medical doctor and they get to decide what we are allowed to do in the field. So basically whatever's within our scope of practice is what we get to do, which can be anything from starting IVs to intubation, giving certain medications, things like that, whatever the doctor has given us permission to do. If we need any other type of orders than we would call and then they would give us permission to do other things. What kind of equipment does the ambulance have to help you respond to calls? TK: We have a cardiac monitor, we have suction equipment, we have what we call CPAP masks for helping people breathe, we have an electric gurney we use now. SS: We have easy IOs. If we can't get an IV on someone, some of our patients are really hard to get IVs on, especially if they're deceased. So sometimes we'll use that easy IO to drill into them to get that IV established. It's kind of our last resort but it always works. Do you always end up at the hospital during a call? TK: We get patients that refuse. They just call and want to be checked out but they don't want to go to the hospital. If they are able to make that decision then they're allowed to refuse. Most of our patients transport though. How long does a typical call take? TK: It could be anywhere from about two hours up to five or six hours, depending on where we're going. So if we have to go to a call all the way in Seligman, it could be an hour just to their house, and then it would be an hour plus back to the hospital, plus our on scene time, plus the time we spend at the hospital and the time it takes to get back to our area. What are the challenges of working in a more remote area? SS: Especially in this area where we have such a long response time, a lot of times it's hard to get to people within the golden hour. TK: Our goal is just to get to them as quick as we can. SS: In the city six minutes is the goal to get to somebody, but we don't have that ability here a lot of times, because we're going to Seligman and a lot of times people live way out in the country on four wheel drive roads. So we get there as fast as we can. TK: It's pretty rural up here, so our nearest hospital would be Flagstaff Medical Center, and then we can also go to Yavapai Regional Medical Center down in Prescott Valley. Then to the west of us is Kingman. Our preferred hospital would be Flagstaff because that's where our medical director is and it's usually the closer hospital. If we have more critical patients, there's also helicopters that can land at our scenes and transport the patients that way to the hospital. We can also call for backup for another ambulance or different hands like the fire department to help ride in with us or help with patient care if it's too much for just one person if there's a lot going on. It can be a pretty good distance to the hospital with certain patients. When it is a faraway call, does someone stay on the phone with the caller? TK: I believe a dispatcher will be on the line if needed. Even though we have long response times here, we do have fire departments that will respond to these calls and so they get there a lot quicker than we do because they're local. So in Seligman there would be Seligman fire who would respond, and they're all EMTs, so basic life support type care. They give us an update and let us know what we have so we're more prepared. But they can stabilize as well as they can until we get there. How do you manage the stress of the job? TK: A lot of our calls are pretty normal everyday calls. And then there are those calls where it does take a lot more skill and thought process to handle. There are certain calls that you don't have every day, so those can be a little more nerve-wracking. If it's a call that we normally don't go on, we'll talk about it on the way to the call. Like, 'Okay, so this is what it could be, this is what we're going to do,' just to prepare ourselves so that our flow is the same so we both know what we want to do on each call, kind of just reviewing just so we're prepared. SS: We've been trained so well that even on the most intense calls you just go through the steps that we've gone through in our training. We always go back to our basics and we can usually get through a call pretty easily. |
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