(originally posted to Fire Engineering Editors Blog and TKT Blog April 27, 2009)
The swine flu buzz is causing information overload. There are three things pertinent to the fire service that must be implemented immediately to protect your members, provide excellent patient care, and be a good public health partner. Here’s the list:
Fire Service Leaders
Immediately notify [...]
(originally posted on Fire Engineering Editorial blog April 24, 2009)
Uh oh. By now, you’ve probably read our breaking news reporting a swine flu outbreak in Southern California and Texas. Is this novel virus with confirmed human-to-human transmission the start of a pandemic? Maybe, maybe not. The CDC released a MMWR report with full details of [...]
(originally published on Fire Engineering Editorial Blog, April 23, 2009)
In small town news worthy of national laughter, the City of Albany, New York treasurer refused to release copies of forgiven parking tickets to an investigating committee citing HIPAA privacy rules. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, for those with momentary lapse of [...]
(originally published on TKT April 23, 2009)
The recent news splash about two Las Vegas firefighters who mistakenly declared a patient dead is a painful lesson on the consequences of complacency. The patient, who had shot himself in the head, was found alive by the coroner after responding firefighter/EMTs called off an ALS unit, deciding the [...]
(originally posted on the Fire Engineering Board blog, March 10, 2009)
Working to improve your cardiac arrest reversal rate? Keeping an eye on Departments who proudly tout consistently high resuscitation rates? Maybe you shouldn’t. Medicine, particularly cardiovascular medicine, has evolved a hundred fold in the past two decades. We used to focus most of our time [...]
(originally posted to The Kitchen Table blog February 8, 2009)
Go figure. At some point in 2005, the New York Legislature aligned a series of Vehicle and Traffic Laws with federal specifications to assure continuance of federal highway and traffic safety monies. Somehow, somewhere, things went awry. Curiously, the faux paux went pretty much unnoticed by [...]
(originally posted on The Kitchen Table blog January 7, 2009)
It happened on Christmas day. A single mortar fired randomly into the Mosul Air Base killed combat trauma surgeon Major John Paul Pryor, MD, age 42. Dr. Pryor was serving with the Army’s 1st Medical Detachment, based in Fort Totten, New York. He served in 2006 [...]
(originally posted to The Kitchen Table blog December 13, 2008)
A study to be published in the January 2009 Journal of Hospital Infection, (Phin NF, Rylands AJ, Allan J, et al. Personal protective equipment in an influenza pandemic: a UK simulation exercise. J Hosp Infect 2008;71(1): 15-21) holds some surprising findings with major implications for Fire [...]