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| What it takes |
Qualifications: Experienced emergency department nurse with teaching credentials geared toward the education of fire department / paramedic personnel. In California, must be certified as a mobile intensive care nurse (MICN).
Reports to: Emergency department nurse manager
Vital skills:
Strong verbal communication to enable coordination with various paramedic and fire departments
Leadership qualities
Responsibilities:
Manage day-to-day base hospital operations
Direct nursing staff and conduct performance evaluations
Oversee quality assurance initiatives
Conduct training for nurses and paramedics on a variety of emergency prehospital care issues
Supervise disciplinary matters
Paul Wynn |
“I decided to give it a try because I liked the thought of broadening my career in nursing and trying something new,” Rosenfield says.
Rosenfield and Steiner jointly develop continuing education classes. In addition to ongoing training, they hold off-site classes for staff members about twice a year. They also go to local fire stations and provide continuing education for paramedics and EMT-1s. Overall, they spend about half their time doing continuing education.
Multiple meetings
Prehospital care coordinators often have their share of meetings to attend and committees on which to serve. Rosenfield is a member of several committees, and meets once a month with other prehospital care coordinators to discuss quality and clinical issues.
Likewise, Berthiaume serves on several agency committees and feels as if she is constantly driving to meetings. “I bought a car for work about two years ago and it already has 57,000 miles.”
Through her committee work, and her strong interest in heart disease, Berthiaume was able to develop a unique program that started at her hospital and now is being implemented throughout San Diego County and catching on in other areas. Traditionally, paramedics call in ECG readings to the base station. But with new technology from Medtronics, ECGs can be transmitted from the field, printed out, and reviewed by a cardiologist while the patient still is en route.
The hospital now has a door-to-balloon time – the amount of time it takes for a patient to enter the hospital door until he or she gets an angioplasty – of about 50 minutes, compared to the national average of about 183 minutes.
“We have dramatically improved our time because our hospital and local agencies worked together and agreed that we could do better,” Berthiaume says.
Paul Wynn is a New York-based medical writer.
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