MUSCATINE, Iowa — Editor's Note: The featured video was published on Nov. 14 and highlights the decrease in firefighter volunteers in Illinois.
The Muscatine Fire Department has new upgrades that will improve the care of patients as they're transported, according to a news release.
Each cot has a newly installed weight scale that provides accurate weight information for patients after they've been loaded onto the cots.
“Weights are essential in EMS (Emergency Medical Services),” Gary Ronzheimer, Muscatine Fire Red Shift Battalion Chief and the Training and Operations Supervisor, said. “We administer medications based on a patient’s weight so we are eliminating the guesswork in administering the correct dosage.”
Prior to installing the weight scales, EMS technicians had to guess the weight, estimating that their guesses were within 10% of the correct weight for approximately 74% of the patients, but this could go up to 20% of the correct weight for other patients.
“When we are inaccurate up to 20% of the weight, we run the risk of overdosing or underdosing a patient when giving critical medications,” Ronzheimer said.
The cot scales will give EMS technicians more accurate weight figures within a range of three percent of a patient's weight, which will especially benefit the elderly and pediatric patients.
“Muscatine Fire Department is a rural EMS service, so we sometimes have to administer various life-saving medications due to how far our transport time can be to hospitals with specialty care,” Ronzheimer said. “When we have extended transport times, we typically have to give multiple doses or run medications on IV infusion pumps to ensure they get the correct dosage over a certain amount of time to maintain therapeutic levels.”
Before the new scales were installed, Muscatine Fire used a demo scale for a couple of months to assess the potential benefit to the department. The department also purchased software that syncs with the scale, imports weight info to a medication chart and calculates appropriate medication dosages based on Muscatine Fire protocols. The new technology will help Muscatine Fire reduce medication errors, improve accuracy and reduce the time it takes EMS crews to verify calculations, Ronzheimer said.
The purchase of these items was funded through the Muscatine Fire Department capital outlay budget.
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