Call 911 and Pray
EXCERPT FROM SEPTEMBER 2001
GOOD HOUSEKEEPING MAGAZINE
Call 911 and Pray
From dispatchers to rescue workers, the people who are supposed to save your life may be stressed, overworked, or just not adequately trained. How to protect your family.
Mishandled patients
October 9, 1999. In Hanover Park, Illinois, Peter and Gisela Stetter called 911 because their 26-year-old epileptic son, Eric, was acting strangely-crying out, pacing, and tugging at his clothes. That behavior is typical in a complex partial seizure, a relatively common condition in epileptics, and one that often subsides on its own. The Stetters believed their son was having a seizure, but hadn’t seen that type before and didn’t know how to handle it.
According to a lawsuit they later filed, neither the rescue squad nor the police officers who responded to their call knew what to do, either. The police handcuffed Eric and forced him face down onto a couch, while paramedics brought in a backboard. Eric stopped breathing, and they where unable to revive him. “Some of the EMTs were young kids working part-time,” says Dennis DeCaro, the Stetters’ lawyer. “They’ve got little or no training in how to handle a person who has epilepsy.”
Lack of training is also the reason that so many patients are dropped, says insurance safety expert Richard Patrick. The 110-hour minimum federal training requirement includes only three hours on the correct handling and transporting of patients. Too often, Patrick says, the crew improvises, carrying an elderly person down the stairs in a kitchen chair, for example, instead of hooking up a special stair-chair device.
And sometimes rescue crews are just careless. In one case, an ambulance crew placed a patient onto a gurney to wheel him to the ambulance but, according to a lawsuit later filed by the man, left the gurney unattended in the driveway for a moment. That was long enough for the gurney to roll down the driveway and tip over, slamming the patient’s head into the concrete.
