Ep. 9 - Critical Complaints

Much like vital signs the critical complaints alert us to issues in our patients that we must be aware of.  In this podcast Marc reviews the five critical complaints and how to assess them, and then how to use that information to determine if your patient is: sick, not-sick, very-sick, or dead.

In this podcast Sonja and Marc review the paramedic neuro assessment.  What do you check?  What does it mean?  There is supporting material on the paramedicine.com website, including video lectures from Marc, as well as powerpoint slides and pdfs that you can download.  It's all there, and it's all free.  Learn how to master the neuro exam!

This podcast explains you how to pull together the Primary Survey, the Secondary Survey and the Respiratory Assessment all into one, integrated, coordinated, and sequentially organized whole. If you're not ALREADY familiar with these tools, make sure to watch them on our channel so that you are familiar with them (see links below). This episode is on YouTube as well, here: https://youtu.be/YtmIlQ-fIH8 and the text call-outs you see during the video there are the things we would expect an experienced paramedic student already to have memorized.   If you're a paramedic (or nursing or medical) student we think you'll find this very helpful because it will show you how a veteran medic organizes their thinking.  If you're already an experienced clinician you'll probably find this a bit overly prescriptive, but that's ok.  You have to walk before you can run.  This is the 'walking' stage.     Once you've become experienced you'll be a lot quicker at this than what I'm demonstrating in the video.  As a student, as someone new to this, who still doesn't know what to ask, this episode will give you a very clear guide on how to direct your assessment of the extremely common presentation of a short of breath patient.    Enjoy, and let us know what you think!  Some background information ...  Primary Survey: https://youtu.be/-nYrQSzOZrY  Secondary Survey: https://youtu.be/vq5q-qqZrm4  Respiratory Assessment:        1. https://youtu.be/s238K8JCjdA       2. https://youtu.be/lT-fr3G_FHI  Head to Toe Exam: https://youtu.be/HMCccIu8ufA

In this show we're going to add a bit more content to the previous episode.  In particular we discuss pulmonary embolisms (PE) and how we as paramedics can assess for this condition.  

In this show we go over the respiratory assessment, giving you an organised, detailed and thorough structure for organising your assessment of the patient with respiratory compromise.  We follow with Episode 4b focusing more specifically on the assessment of pulmonary embolism.  As always, come check us out at www.paramedicine.com.

As a paramedic, how do you know if you've done everything you're supposed to have on a call? In this episode, we cover the Secondary Survey which covers all we need to do after we have had initial contact with the patient. The show will give you the mental structure you need to make sure that you stay focused and organised in student scenarios and in real life. Come visit us www.paramedicine.com for the podcast show notes.

You NEED to understand this drug if you are going to be a paramedic. Join us for a deep dive into the fascinating history of adrenaline, a detailed explanation of its mechanism of action, and an explanation of how we use adrenaline in clinical practice.

In this episode we are going to be focusing on the Primary Survey that Paramedics do as they first approach a clinical case. Usually this is the first few critical minutes as we are working out our priorities in how to manage the patient and the scene.

In our very first show, we introduce ourselves and speak briefly about the goals of the show and where we hope to go from here. This is who we are, and what we intend to do. We hope you join us for our ongoing Paramedic TRIP! (Translating Research Into Practice).