Ambulance Safety

Just like any other job, the most important aspect of work on a daily basis is safety. This is an area that as an EMT, you cannot overlook. To say the least, as an EMT you have many distractions and have to multi task often. From caring for the patient or victim, to treating them, safely transporting them to a medical facility, getting through traffic and making any necessary phone calls to report what is going on, the daily duties for an EMT keep them extremely busy.

There are many hazards that an EMT must be aware of in order to be as safe as possible. Over the next few blogs I will go over some EMT statistic's when it comes to safety, as well as several hazards EMT's are confronted with everyday.

EMT fatalities are more then twice the national average for any other profession.

There are an estimated 12.7 fatalities per 100,000 workers.

There are a few different causes of these fatalities such as homicide, infectious diseases, and exposure to hazardous materials. But the main cause of EMT fatalities is ambulance crashes.

Other dangers of the job include assaults, lower back injuries, hearing loss, stress, long work hours which leads to drowsiness, and extreme temperatures.

With safety being the biggest area of concern, it is important to try to prevent as many EMT fatalities as possible. To do this proper training and exectution of what you have learned as an EMT must be put into place. In addition to training, ambulance safety is the biggest issue at hand. Many adjustments need to be made to ambulances in order to go from being one of the most dangerous vehicles on the road, to one of the safest.