Smoke (Fire) Alarms

Every house should have several smoke alarms. There should be a smoke alarm in every bed room so that when a fire occurs the person in the room is more likely to be woken up. Besides having an alarm in every room there should be at least one alarm on every level of the house and in the kitchen.
Alarms should be tested every month. This is done easily but pushing the test alarm button. If the alarm is not working properly try to change the batteries. The batteries should be changed every time there is a time change, so twice a year.
When testing alarms make sure that everyone in the building knows where to go in case of a fire. Practice getting them to location safely. Also, it is good to have the alarms set off at night once to see if everyone in the house wakes up. If it does not wake everyone up you may want to look in to placing more alarms in the house.
Smoke alarms are not very expensive and some fire departments even give out smoke alarms because an alarm is the first way to get a person notified of smoke in the house, which in an indicator of fire.

Suing problems today.

WoW! There is a lot going on in society today. Everyday people are getting sued for more and more little things. Some people are suing movie producers because of offensive things that were in the movie. Other people are suing people because they messed up their new iPhone. In the EMS field people are getting sued for not doing things the way the patients or patient’s family thinks they should be done. Still others are being sued for a simple recording error.

Many EMS personnel are being sued because of documentation errors. In the emergency world everything must be documented. If you go to someone’s house on a call and they refuse care it must be written, signed, witnessed, and signed by the witness. If a person puts a c-collar on a patient and forgets to document a c-collar was placed on the patient the family can come back and sue by saying the proper precautions we not made in treating the patient. In the emergency world if it is not documented it was not done and that rule follows in court. If someone is suing you and there is nothing you can do to prove them wrong except what you say because you did not document it properly.

Almost all EMS personnel are taught how to properly do paper work by another member of their department or they may take classes on how to document properly. This is becoming a more prevalent issue because people are suing over every issue because they want money.

Incident Command

When the fire fighters arrive on a scene, unless they are in charge, they want to know what they are supposed to do. Fire fighters can guess on what they are doing but will have no clue what their other fire fighters are doing. This is where incident command comes into play.
We need an incident commander to keep track of everything that is going on at a scene. For smaller scenes this is not very hard. However, when we come upon a large fire scene, or a hazardous material site there are several departments and agencies involved. The more people involved the more complicated a scene becomes.
The incident commander(IC) will have chiefs of other departments and the heads of other agencies work under them. The IC will delegate positions to the others like safety, planning, logistics, or many others things. It depends how large the scene is how many people are under the IC. There can be as many as seven, usually three or four are preferred though. Each of the subdivisions that the IC made will have a team of people under them.
Everything that happens under the subdivisions is reported back to the IC by the subdivisions head. As you can tell by reading this it can get very complicated. The most important aspect of having an IC is that there should be good communication. Communication is vital in emergency situations, especially when they are really large.