Quality Assurance

So yesterday was our QA meeting at work... There's 6 of us on the QA committee, 1 BLS provider, 1 ALS provider, 1 Supervisor, 1 Critical Care Medic, 1 Dispatcher, and the QA Officer. Basically during the QA gig we sit down at the conference table, with a stack of 5% of the run sheets for the QA period, which in this case was 3 months worth, so there were probably close to ~400 call sheets there. After we go through those, we look at the runs for the QA period where medications were administered. Being that we're primarily a transport service, one would think we don't give much medications.

There's this provider, who we have been running into a lot in QA. Last period, he had a serious mishap that would be referred to as a sentinel event, in a hospital. I don't want to elaborate too much, but let's call it a horrific lapse in judgment that took a bad turn for the patient.

So there's three runs from this provider. They are escalating in severity in terms of poor judgment. The ultimate conclusion was that the provider hadn't learned anything since the incident and we voted to take away his controlled substance standing orders. It's really upsetting to me that people can be this way. We're not doctors, we're paramedics, and we must remember that we are not practicing medicine and need to display some restraint.

I don't know if it's an education problem, or if it's just the way some individuals are, but it really distresses the hell out of me. It's people like that who give medics a bad name.

But yeah, so that was my day yesterday. Back to work wednesday.