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Comment by hnriot | Hacker News Reader

What has happened to humans??? millions of years evolving to a truly miraculous level of efficiency and agility and we still don't think that possibly moving a little quickly to someone who's heart has stopped is a good idea? Since there were paramedics (plural) it wouldn't impede anything if they ran, and it would most certainly increase the chances of saving someone.

To me this is disgraceful, it sounds like OSHA got involved and made policy something that must surely be counter intuitive. Yes, I know the statistics of small risk- done often, but this is such a sad condition for our special to have reached when people carrying life saving equipment don't move a little faster to save someone.

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There's a time to be an excited fool and leap blindly into action, and then there is a time be a professional and carefully move into place to do your work quietly and skillfully.

You wouldn't happen to use a staging server, would you?

I was going to argue the point, but I'll just point here: http://phillydan.wordpress.com/2012/03/28/good-emts-dont-run...

This was probably the best point made against running, but still...

Our professional emergency response people should be capable of hustling/running over to the people that need their help while maintaining their composure and ability to think.

It is true that exertion causes a sympathetic response, but hustling/running over to someone doesn't produce such a significant sympathetic response where people can't think straight. I know that it's inherently a stressful situation, but our professionals should be able to handle that, and the additional stress of hustling/running over is negligible.

A professional attitude and good training doesn't counter basic biological processes. What do you gain from running? A few seconds, some of which you'll have to use up recovering from the run, and irrelevant bystanders thinking you're 'doing your job'. What do you lose by running? A lot - as described in the link, which has an excellent run-down.

These guys do this often. If they're running around they will eventually slip, and who knows what equipment they'll damage on the way down. Now he can't help and the problem is much worse than if it took him an extra 10 seconds to get over there.

If you infrequently enter a situation which has a low chance of hurting you, you are probably fine. But if you frequently enter those situations then it's just a matter of time before it happens to you.

If you as a paramedic rush to every patient, before long you're going to take a pointless injury and be unable to work. For the sake of saving one patient - the trivial amount of time saved by rushing rarely affects outcomes - getting injured means that while you recover, you can no longer attend dozens of other patients at all. Hardly 'miraculous efficiency'.

It might seem like common sense for the paramedic to rush. But in practice, rushing doesn't save lives.

Rule #1 in any first-responder situation is to keep the rescuer safe. There are tons and tons of examples where rushing led to mistakes that killed the rescuer AND the patient.

So don't be upset! Moving with caution is not an OSHA rule - it is best practice learned over decades of hard-earned experience.

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