“Health Care Is A Right, Not A Privilege”
Outside of my day job I spend a vast amount of my time providing volunteer disaster response and communications for the American Red Cross Bay Area. This past weekend, however, I was invited to embed with the Rock Medicine team at San Francisco’s Outside Lands 2010 festival in Golden Gate Park. This volunteer group of medical professionals and care takers provide free-of-charge emergency medical services at large events throughout California. (For more information on Rock Medicine please see the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic or the San Francisco Medical Society.) What follows are observations I made while in the field with Rock Med.
- When using a repeater, always monitor the input frequency. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been unable to hear a station because they didn’t have a strong signal into the repeater. If the station is far enough away there’s not much to be done, but in our case we were closer to the transmitting station than we were to the repeater tower, so it would’ve made sense to either switch to simplex or always monitor the input frequency.
- Patient advocacy and patient privacy require that you learn some medical lexicon. BLS, IPR, AMS, CSPINE? You’re going to be getting a lot of traffic like this as a radio operator, it’s not important that you know how to respond to an IPR patient, only that you know you’re calling them IPR for their own safety.
- Bring your mobile phone charger. Even with every mode of radio communication at your disposal, people are going to revert to mobile phone usage, and your phone, or your supervisors phone, will die half way through the day. (see Keith Robertory’s article ‘Will text messaging work in disaster?‘)
- Use a team lead’s fist name as the team’s tactical callsign. First, everyone on a medical team should know who’s in charge: “I’m on team Robert.” Second, and this happens a lot, people tend to forget magic numbers: “Am I on team 1 or team 2?“
- Have a backup land-line phone. I thought it was interesting that every facility at this event had a hard wired phone. Rock Med didn’t use theirs, but it was nice to know one could call a facilities office directly should the need arise.
- Teach your team how to properly hold a radio. Numerous times I witness people holding radios sideways, upside down, laying them flat on tables, and doing other inappropriate things with their antennas. Using a radio doesn’t require an electrical engineering degree, so take the time to show your volunteers how to hold a radio upright and away from your mouth :).
- Put everyone on one frequency. Having both the medical dispatch and the medical teams listening to one frequency made a huge difference in response times. Teams in the field could hear dispatch describe the location of a medical incident and the closest team could respond. This was opposed to the traditional method of a central controller dispatching whichever team they assumed was closest.
There was blood, there was vomit, there were stitches. I came away knowing more than I ever wanted to know about alcohol dehydration (seriously, drink some water people). All in all I had a really good time, big thanks to Eric Elliot for dragging me along.
Oh, and shirtless dude: At least put on some shoes!
