<p>I wasn’t suggesting you work with pregnant teens and teen parents and I don’t think anyone’s suggested you do patient education. The point I was trying to make was that you have to get pretty creative with service work if you want it to be meaningful, and working with pregnant teens and teen parents was the route I personally chose. </p>
<p>It sounds like you have considerable skills, especially as an EMT B and an EMT I student. I’m sure you can put those skills to use somewhere (and I’m not excluding Africa!). If I were in your shoes, I’d start by identifying a group of people I want to work with–which is likely a group of people I’d like to learn more about. So far you’ve mentioned that you don’t want to work with older people and you don’t want to work with adolescents. What about kids? Adults? Or both, and go with families with young kids? I’m sure there’s a demographic you want to know more about–after all, you must like people to some degree…or why would you want to go into medicine?</p>
<p>Once you’ve figured out who you want to work with, I think the next step is getting to know some individuals from that group to identify a way you can make a meaningful impact over the course of a year. Say, for example, you noticed during the course of your EMT work that many parents of young children use the ER for primary care because they lack the skills to identify when a child needs to go to the ER. What if you worked with families in your area to develop the practical skills necessary to distinguish when to call 911? If you teamed up with a national program and taught skills using a book/manual written for this purpose, it’s unlikely you’d be overstepping your boundaries.</p>
<p>I guarantee you this project could take a year of full time work. I actually know a few professors and MDs in southern California who have been working on a very similar project to the one I just described for the past 7 years, and have won many grants and recognition for their work.</p>
<p>Ok, but have you ever actually used those skills in a real-world setting? From what you’ve said so far, it doesn’t sound like it. You said you would put a nurse who wanted to volunteer to work in a nursing-related capacity, which is true. But you certainly wouldn’t take a nursing student or recent grad with no work experience and put them into a volunteer position in a third world country, which usually involves the expectation that you know what you’re doing and can do it independently. You can’t do that as a new EMT-B/I/P grad. It took me months on FTO training to be comfortable with my skills and my job. I certainly could not have volunteered in the capacity that you’re envisioning right out of EMT class.</p>
<p>And as WOWmom pointed out, EMTs are a dime a dozen among the pre-med crowd (although it is quite a bit less common to find one that has actually worked on an ambulance - for some reason, pre-meds seem to think that just the training is impressive… it isn’t)</p>
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<p>To be blunt, you just watch because you have no skills of use in a hospital setting, pure and simple. EMT training is for pre-hospital care. </p>
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<p>This is very true - often they have plenty of personnel who are trained and ready to use equipment that just isn’t there or is broken or otherwise in disrepair. There are companies here in the US that collect old, still working equipment from hospitals that are upgrading to the latest and greatest or are just rotating out old equipment and ship it out to countries that need it. That might be a cool thing to get involved with.</p>
<p>“Anyone can hold a baby or talk to teen girls, but not everyone can save a life.”</p>
<p>Actually, my D. has saved at least one life in her volunteering duty, she was told so by police. She could have saved more than one, but she does not know that for the fact. She was woprking at Crisis center hotline. She enjoyed it immensely. Some of callers were suicidal. For some reason or another, these people were not seeing professionals, they were not talking to anyone close to them, they prefer anonymity of hotline. D. went thru training, you need to know how to talk to people in great despare. However, not many can do that, you will disagree, I am sure you think that “anyone can talk”. You need to make them feel better. D. said that it is extremely rewarding when some of them were laughing at the end of their conversation. Well, the person that she was told, she has saved, called hotline from the bridge, that is how ready he was. He eventually hang up, but my D. notified police (it was just normal procedure that they were trained in) and police was there on time.</p>
<p>I have nothing against volunteering at any place on earth. However, when person is that young, I heard that they themselves need a lot of supervision, which sometime is destracting to professionals there who have great skills and ready to provide help for sick, but have to spend precious time watching over very young volunteers who are not equipped very well to be on thier own. I am sure there are others who have different opinion based on their experience. Frankly, I would not let my D. know pointing that if she really want to help, there is plenty to do here. She is thingking about going (she will be 23 at a time), but I am not supporting it.</p>
<p>You guys are right (although I do disagree with WOW, many paramedics in my area would agree more strongly than me about the treatment of EMS professionals…my EMT-B instructor being one of them. This was one of his favorite topics). I like the idea posted by Kristen (about starting a system to educate patients on the use of emergency care). It’s something that I think would interest me. Where exactly would I start?</p>