Grand Prize Dumb Idea

The link is  now fixed.

While I don’t always agree with Rogue Medic, generally his ideas are pretty well thought out with some degree of logic to them. Again, that doesn’t mean that I agree with them, but I respect them.

Not this time.

If We Were Really Serious About Intubation Quality

If We Were Really Serious About Intubation Quality – we would require that each medic be intubated by a different medic at least once a month.

Yes, he is really suggesting that each paramedic intubate, and in turn be intubated, once a month if they don’t get an intubation in the field. I’m almost speechless.

Read the entire post and the comments.

Keep this in mind. There are two drug types used in intubation of live patients in EMS. One is a sedative or anesthetic. Either one will effectively put a patient to sleep and take away their ability to control their own airway. The other is a paralytic drug, which does exactly what the name states. It chemically paralyzes patients, including their ability to breath. These are the two steps in what’s generically called “Rapid Sequence Intubation”. They are also the first two steps in something known as Lethal Injection. Yes, these are the first two drugs given when someone is being executed. Not stuff to play with lightly.

I’ve done a number of these intubation over the past 14 or so years. Every single one of them has scared the crap out of me, including the one I did about two weeks ago. Every. Single. One. I would never consider doing this on anyone that was not in an immediately life threatening situation. Even under the best of circumstance things can go wrong. Which is why we have a number of back up airways available. The last of which is performing a surgical airway. Which means we do like Hawkeye Pierce and take a scalpel to the patient’s neck and create an airway. I’ve done that before too, and the memory of it scares the crap out of me.

If this was April 1, I’d get a chuckle out of his post and move on. Only it’s August 16 and I don’t think he’s kidding.

Which scares me even more.

I wonder if he were a police officer if he’d suggest that each officer should shoot and be shot by another officer every month? Maybe each surgeon should have to have and perform surgery on another surgeon each month. Maybe every electrician should have to be electrocuted each month. I could go on, but you get the idea.