I am not an Ambulance Driver!

I am not an Ambulance Driver! Whether it's nurses, doctors, or the guy at the gas station, and for the millionth time, I am not an ambulance driver! I've been doing this for twenty years, and still to this day people do not understand the scope, the skill, the capacity, and the training that's involved to be an EMT, and most especially-a paramedic. Let me elaborate for those who don't know: it takes 8 weeks of training (2 solid months, 5 days a week) to train for the EMT-basic level, and there are a variety of different ways to achieve this qualification. It's certainly more training than a "driver" would ever have to do. I might even tolerate the label: driver if the training stopped there, but it doesn't. The EMT-paramedic level involves extensive training, typically 2 rigorous years of course work, hot days at the hazmat extrication junkyard, long weeks of OR intubating, and long unpaid hours working the ER starting IV's and pushing drugs. Additionally, we must obtain CPR, ACLS, PALS, PHTLS, EVOC, HAZMAT, Advance Airway techniques, NREMT certification, state certification, and sometimes county certification. Does that sound like the skills a "driver" possesses? What do you think?

(Paramedic practicing intubation)

Some people will want to point out that we DO in fact drive an ambulance using this to support their assertion that we are drivers. While this is true that we do drive an ambulance, an EMT-basic typically drives the pt. and the paramedic to the ER in a EMS capacity, we should not be called ambulance drivers. Here's why: "would you call a police officer a police car drive?" I mean, they do drive a police car, and they do transport criminals to jails which is analogous to emts transporting victims to the hospital. So why don't we call a police officer a driver? RESPECT...that's why! Nurses and other healthcare professionals lack respect for EMT's. Citizens lack RESPECT for medics, especially when we come up behind them while driving with our lights on. Would you call a firefighter a fire truck driver? I could go on. So why do we do this? (This isn't us anymore!)

After careful review and many years thinking about it, and putting up with it without being rude to people (well sometimes) I've come up with a theory. EMS is a very young profession, so young in fact that memories of funeral home hearses, gurneys, and two attendees wearing clean white pressed uniforms running to the victim, scooping them up, and tossing them into the back before scurrying around to the front; whereby they both jump in and race to the ER. The ER would do the "real" medical care and treatment.

Entertainment (movies, TV programming, etc) has rendered our profession very poorly and people have this image still ingrained in their polluted brains. This is not EMS. We have come a long way baby. Today, EMT's can arrive at an emergency scene wielding a arsenal of intensive care medicine that amounts to nothing less than a small portable ER. We can intubate pt's and subsequently secure their airways, we can initiated IV's (D5W, NS, LR), administer drugs (paralytics, narcotics, thrombolytics, etc), defibrillate, 12 lead EKG's, immobilization's, oxygen, trachea cut downs, chest decompression's, and much more! Does that sound like a skill set for a driver?

(This is what we do!)

and

this is not EMS!

GOT IT?!!