EMS 4303-21.04.01-2B25-S1, Legal, Political, and Regulatory Environment in EMS
Part I: Introduce yourself to your classmates with your name, location, current employment, and future goals.
Hello, my name is Kamryn Keyes. I am married with 3 beautiful girls. I am not working at the moment, but my long-term goal is to become an AAPC instructor. My short-term goal is to become a medical biller and coder supervisor.
Part II: Please review the case study below.
You are a lieutenant-paramedic assigned to a busy fire-service-based advanced life support transport ambulance that is quartered with a firefighter-paramedic staffed engine company, which is under the command of the district captain. The engine company typically accompanies the ambulance on priority emergency medical responses. Local ordinances and state law designate the fire department as the sole provider of all emergency medical services (EMS) within the city boundaries. Additionally, local ordinances prohibit the fire department from providing nonemergency medical transfers.
You report for your shift, which begins at 7 a.m., and find that the ambulance is just backing into the station. The crew you are relieving shares that it has been another busy day, and they are anxious for you to relieve them. The engine company is on the scene of a structure fire in another district and is expected to be there for an extended period.
As you are receiving the turnover from the crew going off duty, the ambulance is dispatched to an unconscious person at a bus stop near one of the neighborhood hospitals. You quickly relieve the crew going off duty and respond to the dispatch. As the ambulance nears the location, you observe a male patient lying in the grass at the bus stop directly next to a busy four-lane urban roadway. The temperature is in the low 30s with snow forecasted later in the morning.
As you approach the patient, he opens his eyes and smiles at you. As the patient moves, you notice a fifth of alcohol that is two-thirds empty. You determine the scene is safe, and you approach the patient. The patient indicates that he has, in fact, consumed two-thirds of the alcohol in the bottle in the last hour or so. The patient’s medical history includes heart disease and uncontrolled diabetes.
The bus stop is approximately one block from the entrance to the emergency room at the neighborhood hospital. You complete your assessment of the patient and transport to the neighborhood hospital. You provide an abbreviated patient report to the hospital and advise you are one block away. When you arrive in the emergency room with the patient, the charge nurse begins to yell at you. The charge nurse is angry that you brought the patient back to the emergency room. Unbeknownst to you, the patient was discharged from the emergency room a few hours earlier. The charge nurse continues to complain in a loud voice that there is nothing wrong with the patient and that a patient’s refusal should have been secured in the field when the police called. Finally, the charge nurse takes the transfer of care report and storms away exclaiming, “I am not dealing with this again.”
In response to the scenario above, please describe areas of potential legal liability and how you would apply knowledge gained of laws reviewed in Unit I and of your organization’s standard medical orders to determine the best course of action. If you are not currently employed by an organization, select an organization’s standing medical orders to support your response.
CH 3301-23.01.00-2B25-S1, Research Methods
Please note that there are two posts needed to successfully complete the discussion board assignment. An initial post addressing the discussion board topic is due by end of day Saturday. A response post to at least one other student is due by end of day Tuesday.
Part I: Introduce yourself to your classmates with your name, location, current employment, and future goals.
Part II: After reading content from chapters one and two in the course textbook, please address the following:
Let’s discuss how subjectivity, objectivity, Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolution and Karl Popper’s Theory of Falsification come together in science. How do these aspects impact hypothesis development, research methods, and the progress of knowledge?
If no initial posts exist to allow for a response to be made, you may submit an additional initial post addressing another aspect of the unit topic.
