Time to talk; getting good on the radio

Time to talk about talking. Lots of my work involves communications.
Be able to give a report in a format recognisable at the other end is invaluable. Ensuring your not leaving out crucial information that needs to be communicated to dispatchers and managers involves some preparations.

When I was in the military we used to give all out reports by proforma precisely planed encoded reports to ensure both ends of the radio knew what they were talking about.
While the message no longer needs to be encoded information still needs to be passed.

To this day I still use proformas for my important radio reports. I’m currently using commercially available cards however if you have access to a printer and a laminator I’d highly encourage you to have a go at making your own.
I’m not a huge fan of using notebooks when I have gloves on, and I love that I can fully clean the surface of the card if it becomes contaminated.
I think this is just another case of prior planning to prevent a poor performance

Interesting ECG and why you should use a 12 lead

I just wanted to quickly post up an interesting ECG, in the past this ECG would probably have been missed by ambulance 3 lead monitors, in a pt without chest pain nothing would have been though of it. This is why, almost every in almost critically ill patient I will attempt a 12 lead, not only to try and give me a full picture of what may be occurring with my patient but to avoid delivering the wrong pt to the wrong hospital and bringing a delay in treatment.
We love sexy pelvic binders, CT6s and exciting trauma procedures. But I think the 12 lead needs to be treated with the same reverence. The more information we can gain about our pt the better we stand to be in the handover.