The long lived what seems to be country wide rivalry between EMTs and Long Tern Care Nurses is an obvious one. Long into social media, you see EMT pages posting ridiculing memes about long term care facilities and the pooor nursing care provided. Visit and EMS forum, and you'll see threads doing the same.
As a former EMT, now LTC Nurse, I've come up with a list things that I do believe every LTC Nurse wished EMTs understood.
1. There's a big difference in quality of care when patient ratios are 2:1 rather than 1:40 plus. When an LTC Nurse doesn't know the answer to a question off the top of his/her head, doesn't know the events leading up to the emergency, I doesn't mean that they are lazy or incompetent, when you have 40 demanding residents, to give medications too, and loads of charting and other work to do, as a charge nurse, you will not know every detail about every resident every minute of the shift. Imagine getting to the hospital to give report on 1 patient and having 40 patients in the back of your ambulance.
2. We don't make the rules. Sometimes as EMTs you may think that just because a patient fell and has no S/S of head injury that the transport isn't necessary, but a doctors order is a doctors order. If a residents primary care physician orders an ER eval, then that's fina. There's nothing you can say that's gonna change the fact that my resident is going to the hospital. As a licensed nurse, I will not be standing in front of my state board at a hearing, having to explain why i refused to carry out a physicians order. I once told an EMT who was being difficult and causing a scene in the hallway, asking why we were sending a resident out for such a small not in his head, in such stormy conditions outside, " Because I'm not putting my license on the line by tellling Dr. Brown (not real name) that I am not sending his patient to the hospital, but you are more than welcome to do so,".
EMTs and Nurses play a very vital but very different part of healthcare today. And I do think that if we could be a little more understanding of each other's roles, responsibilities, obligations, and limitations, the ride for the resident from the LTC Facilty to the local ED may be a little less rocky.
