Course: Career Communication

Emergency Responder

As an emergency medical responder, you will often be the first medically trained person to arrive on the emergency situation. Your initial care is vitally important because it is available sooner than more advanced emergency medical care and could mean the difference between life and death.

The four basic goals of your training are to know:

- what not to do
- how to use your emergency medical responder supplies
- how and when to improvise
- how to assist other emergency medical providers

As an emergency responder, you must understand your role in the emergency system. The typical sequence of events of the emergency reponse system is:

1. reporting
2. dispatch
3. emergency medical response
4. EMS vehicle response
5. hospital care

As an emergency responder, your primary goal is to provide immediate care for a sick or injured patient. As more highly trained personnel (EMTs or paramedics) arrive on the scene, they might depend on you to assist them in gathering information about the emergency as well as treating and preparing the patient for transportation.

Once your role in treating the patient is finished, your job isn’t finished.  Remember that medical information about a patient is confidential and should be shared only with other medical personnel who are involved in the care of that particular patient. If asked, it is important that you record (document) your observations about the scene, the patient’s condition, and the treatment you provided. Documentation should be clear, concise, accurate, and according to the accepted policies of your organization.

The overall leader of the medical care team is the physician or medical director. To ensure that the patient receives appropriate medical treatment, it is important that emergency medical responders receive direction from a physician.

Quality improvement helps to determine the level of care rendered by an emergency medical service. It measures care in six component areas: safety, effectiveness, patient-centeredness, timeliness, efficiency, and equitability. EMS systems should have an ongoing quality improvement program.