SMCC trains immigrants with medical backgrounds to be EMTs

The new program, believed to be the first of its kind in the nation, is designed to meet a growing need for multilingual emergency medical technicians. SOUTH PORTLAND — As a physician in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Jolly Ntirumenyerwa regularly stitched up wounded and bloody bodies, casualties of a long-running civil war that has killed several of her family members and led her to seek asylum here in Maine.           Now, Ntirumenyerwa, who lives in Portland, works two part-time jobs as a health care aide. Like many immigrants, her professional credentials aren’t recognized in the United States. But she...

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Answering the call: EMT class a new challenge as recruits enter next phase of training

After nearly three months, the recruits of Class 21 began their emergency medical technician training last week, embarking on a new, much more rigorously academic portion of the six-month academy. English: Medic 9 (Photo credit: Wikipedia) “Up until this point, they’ve been in fire classes and fire classes have a lot of hands-on, outside scenarios like the burn building or rescue tech, cutting up cars, that kind of stuff,” said Bernie Studds, a fire medic III called in to teach the nine-week EMT course. “But about 90 percent of the calls we run out in the field are EMS-related, so this would be the best foundation, the greatest foundation...

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Louisville EMS slammed with 151 overdose calls

English: Louisville Metro EMS (LMEMS) Transport Ambulance (Photo credit: Wikipedia) The city's top health official told some council members Wednesday that "Louisville needs to grow up" and offer more medication-assisted treatment since abstinence-based programs don't work for everyone. Some treatment programs don't allow methadone, Suboxone and Subutex to try to wean addicts off stronger drugs, said Dr. Joann Schulte, who heads the Metro Department of Public Health and Wellness. Critics of using drugs in treatment say this method can merely substitute one addiction for another. Following local and national news...

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International Consensus On Sepsis

In February 2016, findings were published in The Journal of the American Medical Association after a task force with expertise in sepsis pathobiology, clinical trials, and epidemiology came together to study current sepsis information.  The task force was formed by the Society of Critical Care Medicine and the European society of Intensive Care Medicine (Angus & Singer, 2016, p. 801).              Definitions and clinical criteria were reevaluated and assessed and then finally a lot of septic issues were rewritten or made increasingly clear.              Key...

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