Snoring EMS dispatcher

[imintrouble, BSN, RN]

I apologize for not having a link to the article. The finer points of this site escape me.

I'll try to describe the incident as best I can.

Woman calls 911 because her husband is in respiratory distress. Dispatcher connects her to someone who will assist her in CPR over the phone. When the phone transfer is made, snoring is heard, and the woman's frantic "Hello" is unanswered for minutes. The news anchors I watched today described the incident with contempt and condemnation for the snoring EMS worker.

Only one added that the person snoring was EMS. Into hour 17 of a 24 hr call shift. I'm torn. I have seen our own EMS people beyond exhausted doing pt ambulance transfers because there was nobody else. Working/awake for 24 hrs and beyond.

On the other hand, I would be beyond furious if the help I was connected to was sleeping.

The resp distress person is fine. The snoring person eventually awakened to help the woman who called 911.

Some jobs are not 9-5. Is it fair to condemn the EMS person who was sleeping without knowing the details?

[OKNurse2be]

I would think that just as nurses are responsible to knowing when it's unsafe for them to be working, like fatigue, an EMS worker should be held responsible too. I also am curious though why they couldn't just send an ambulance? I feel that in any profession where peoples lives are potentially at stake, the standards all around should be higher. It's the workers responsibility to know when he/she cannot perform their duties safely, but it's also the employers responsibility to make sure conditions are such that allow the workers to perform at their best. That means having adequate staffing, decent shifts etc.

[Double-Helix, BSN, RN]

There have been studies conducted that show that errors increase significantly in shifts longer than 8 hours. I can't imagine how they would increase if nurses were working 24 hour shifts, rather than just 12's. I've never understood why EMS workers are permitted to work 24 hour shifts. i think that the reasoning is that they have time to sleep on their shift (sometimes) so it's not continuous 24 hours of work (although often it is). However, when I've spoken to some EMS acquaintances about this, they have all said that they like their 24 hour shifts, as they can work two per week and have the rest of their time off.

This reminds me of the air traffic controller incident last year when the planes were trying to communicate with the ground tower, but the traffic controller had fallen asleep. That situation ended without injury, but it did raise a lot of awareness about the detriment of long shifts of air traffic controllers. Unfortunately, I really doubt this situation will spark the same awareness of EMS shifts.

I'm also assuming that an ambulance was dispatched to the home, but it was necessary to connect the caller to the EMS worker so that she could initiate CPR, if needed, before the ambulance arrived.