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Comment by supwiggles | Hacker News Reader

One of my paramedic instructors told me a pretty funny story.

Apparently they were on shift one Saturday afternoon, when a call came through for a Code 2 (Cardiac Arrest) at a local racecourse.

Anyway, it was about 15 minutes away so they took off in a hurry, all the while receiving notes on their terminal regarding the job. Apparently it went along the lines of this:

Initial: Unknown Age, Cardiac Arrest, Racecourse etc Update: CPR in Progress Update: Doctor has self accounced at scene. Update: Doctor has called patient as deceased. CPR ceased.

It took another 5 minutes for the paramedics to get to the racecourse, and they still unloaded their gear and made their way to the patient. When asking for the doctor, they found that it was actually the racecourse veterinarian who had made the call.

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I'm assuming the patient wasn't a racehorse?

If I had a dollar for every time a dermatologist or podiatrist tried to be 'helpful' on an emergency scene... I could probably buy a coffee at Starbucks... The same goes for 'nurses.' If an ER nurse wants to help out, that's great. Invariably though, it's a nurse at a nursing home or dialysis center...

I don't mean to imply these folks aren't skilled professionals, but prehospital medical emergencies are generally well outside their experience, and the confusion that arises from that can be dangerous.

Unlike a podiatrist, a dermatologist went to medical school. If they're young, there's actually a good chance that they were among the very best medical students -- in the past few years, dermatology has become one of the more competitive fields in medicine because of the lifestyle (short predictable hours, high pay, minimal insurance hassles).

There are daft people in every field, but I would be delighted to have most of the derm residents and attendings I've met in an emergency (in fairness, I should note that this is a small sample, drawn from a couple top-tier hospitals, and biased towards people who do volunteer backcountry search and rescue).

Yeah, the podiatrist comment was a bit tongue-in-cheek.

Like I said, I'm not try to discredit these folks as skilled (and in many cases, extremely smart) individuals.

However, a couple weeks of a rotation through an ER during med school isn't really going to prepare you well for prehospital emergencies (SAR, on the other hand, can be great training for that). Making an assessment and clinical decisions based on fairly limited information isn't something I've found most physicians to be comfortable with, especially in an emergency setting.

My list of 'glad to see you' docs is pretty much: ER, OB, and Anesthesia.

I can't tell if you're joking or not, but a podiatrist does have to go to medical school.

On the other hand, it's good to have anyone step in to lend a hand, instead of standing back like sullen sheep.

That depends... If they start questioning my patient care decisions, I'm going to ask them to step away. Fortunately, we have preprinted cards explaining that if they want to take over patient care, they need to speak to my medical control physician (who will need to hear a _very_ compelling argument before they would be willing to hand a scene over to someone else)

In the UK vets are pretty highly qualified. And, unlike most humans, horses can't tell you where the pain is or what it's like.

I think I'd be happy for a vet to do some doctoring.

Are you implying that the emergency call was for a horse/dog in cardiac arrest, or just that the racecourse vet was the 'doctor' performing on the human?

Sorry, I should have clarified. It's late here, and I am tired.

The call was for a human, the 'doctor' who called it was a vet at the racecourse.

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