Medics limit CPR amid 911 backlog

[The Straight Story]

Medics limit CPR amid 911 backlog

The epic blizzard kept city medics so busy that -- for the first time ever -- they were given a time limit for performing CPR on patients, The Post has learned.

EMS workers normally call a doctor for advice after working on a patient for 20 minutes.

The doctor normally allows them to keep trying to revive the person, sometimes letting them continue for more than an hour.

But faced with an enormous backlog of 1,300 calls, the medics were told to quit after 20 minutes and move on to the next case.

CPR can last a long time and sometimes medics can work on patients for as long as an hour.


Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/heart_stopping_medics_limit_cpr_7Ahv46Qfw6NXpYklWpMhiO#ixzz19R5Tw9qq

[Poll_Blind]

1. What's killing more people? Al-Qaeda or the cuts we have to make to fund the wars?

Fucking sad.

PB

[virgogal]

5. I read the article as a weather emergency,not as a shortage of

first responders.

[Poll_Blind]

6. Understood. I just read an article yesterday that 65 BILLION couldn't be...

...accounted for in Afghanistan. Whenever I read anything the first thought in my mind is "could this situation have been made better with more money" and the answer in most cases is yes.

:shrug:

PB

[damntexdem]

2. Triage in an emergency is understandable.

But could the EMS have been better prepared, so that triage would have been less necessary?

[alex cross]

3. Climate scientists have been predicting the effects of

anthropomorphic global climate disruption for decades. Instead of giving tax cuts to the uber-wealthy and big paychecks to dog murderers why don't we have enough EMS personnel on standby at all times to handle these types of situations?

[Liberal_in_LA]

4. awful