You’ve looked at other paramedic continuing education resources but it’s the same basic material they taught you in school. There’s more you need to know, or you might miss something, someone might get hurt, or worse someone might die. You don’t feel ready. Your goal is to control the chaos. To become an expert in the field of prehospital medicine. And this is all driven by the desire to be there for someone on the worst day of their life. To change an outcome that would have otherwise been catastrophic if you weren’t there.

There’s no resource for the practicing paramedic to plug the holes that were left behind by paramedic school. Everything seems stuck in basic algorithms of “A” then “do B” but what do you do when "A” wasn’t in the book. We need to get away from the algorithmic thinking and instead shift to understanding the principles behind WHY if A then B.

The truth is, you can’t learn it all. Emergency Medicine includes too many pathologies and 911 calls are too unique and chaotic to know the answer to every situation. Instead of trying to learn every answer to every call, you need guiding principles for your knowledge to stand on. If you build these principles they become the foundation for every call no matter the complaint, for every situation, no matter the chaos surrounding you.

If you have the foundation you can be stable when the storm comes. You can know when to push forward or when to change course. And then each additional piece of advanced content that you learn can be added to that foundation to build on, because mastery is not a destination, it’s a journey and the journey never ends.

We are your hosts, Ross Orpet & Will Berry and this is EMS Cast.