Helping the Helpers

"I need to still work, I want to still work, I want to help out where I can, but my family comes first. This is a solution to the problem."

"Obviously I want to be in my home and my home is the most comfortable place I can be."

"But this is a great second option."

Rick Stewierski, 35, Paramedic, Orillia, Ontario

"We have a lot of requests, but we need to have more relationships with dealers and places that are willing to lend their campers out."

Ashley Oriet, Windsor, Ontario, originator RVs for Canada's Frontline

"We kind of went, 'wait a minute, we have really great customers, and they're not allowed to use their units right now."

"I wonder if any of them would be willing to maybe lend [their recreational vehicles for temporary use of novel coronavirus first-responders]."

Stacey Robinson, co-owner, Great Canadian RV dealership, Peterborough, Ontario

2011 Thor Four Winds

Josie Beck

Taking inspiration from what they understood to be happening elsewhere, a number of people involved in the recreational vehicle industry gathered themselves to make an effort in trying to solve a problem related to health-care workers' exposure to the coronavirus, needing a temporary place to stay that would keep them separated -- out of necessity and understandable caution to protect their loved ones -- from their families. 

A movement has started across the country reflecting motor homes and other recreational vehicles standing unused in view of public health guidelines cautioning people not to travel at a time when the border between Canada and the United States is temporarily closed, and so is the border between Ontario and Quebec, leaving people unable to access their summer cottages; RV camping areas and tourism sites closed while the international community battles COVID-19.

At the same time public health guidelines caution first responders and health care workers to find alternative places to sleep rather than returning to their homes after their workplace shifts in fear of transmitting the dread coronavirus to their family members. This was the dilemma facing Rick Stewierski. And then he heard of a growing movement to loan out motorhomes to health-care workers.

2018 Cruise Radiance 28QD.

Nikki Fannin

Going to work, when that workplace is known to be contaminated with COVID-19 does not inspire confidence that returning home afterward will not adversely affect others. Looking for alternative places to stay during this pandemic can put a strain on front-line emergency workers, both psychologically and economically. Yet the need to self-isolate for those who are required to do so for 14 days after exposure to the virus is real and must be observed.

A woman in Windsor felt it incumbent on herself to try to help those whose professionalism helps others. She knew that in the United States there was a movement to match front-line workers with RVs and other mobile shelters, and saw no reason why she shouldn't do the same. Which led her to launch a Facebook group for that purpose. Ashley Oriet's RVs for Canada's Frontline has seen a flood of requests for campers come in, as well as offers from RV owners willing to loan them out.

Her team of nine volunteer administrators log front-line workers and donors into a database, then match them by region. Entirely successfully so, to the extent that demand has outstripped supply. And nor is she the only one who sees the advantage in helping others at this time of national stress. In Peterborough, Ontario Al and Stacey Robinson, RV dealers, joined the group started by Oriet.

They had received a request from a local doctor which alerted them to the necessity of helping medical personnel find temporary accommodation to self-isolate. With the vast listing they have as a dealership of RV owners and knowing they're unable to take their vehicles to parks or camp grounds they decided to approach these contacts with a proposal to help front-line workers. Just several weeks into the venture they have united 30 front-line workers with RVs on loan which they deliver themselves.

As for Orillia's Rick Siewierski, his experience is that with the use of a loaned RV he can still be at home in a sense, since he has parked the vehicle in the driveway of his family home. He can speak with and see his pregnant wife at a safe distance, even share meals together outdoors while he 'lives' next door in the RV.

"We have amazing customers."

"We said, guys, if you have an RV and you’re not using it, and you’re comfortable with it, tell us and if we have a front-line worker that is in need, we can match the RV with the health-care worker."

Stacey Robinson, Peterborough, Ontario

Paramedic Rick Siewierski, centre, poses for a photo with his wife Mariam Siewierski, left, and Al Robinson of Great Canadian RV, near Orillia, Ont.  HO/The Canadian Press

The Imbecility of Paramedic Abuse by Patients

"I find that the worst cases of abuse don't leave a wound. It is the sexual assaults that are the most frustrating because it is often not brought on by people in an altered mental state, such as dementia, but by people who are disgusting."
"Most often drunks, who don't believe women should be in uniform and don't respect them in the field."
"I don't get too bothered by stuff [exposure to insults, violence while on the job]. And if that person was in an altered state when something happened -- then I honestly don't think twice about it afterwards, because they have absolutely no idea what they are doing."
"I see people on their worst day. Even if it isn't something we'd consider an emergency -- it is that person's emergency -- and if we can make that day even a little better, that's the high of doing this [job as a frontline first-responder as a paramedic]."
Jennie Cubitt, paramedic, rural Ontario

BBC News   Paramedic Jerry Patton had a brick thrown at him while he was treating a patient

Canadian society is hugely dependent in times of urgent medical situations, on the knowledge that they can dial a simple set of three numerals -- 911 -- to alert professionals skilled in the medical sciences and the art of patient care, to their emergency. They do so out of desperation, finding themselves in a situation they cannot themselves either solve or help themselves out of. If it isn't the individual themselves who calls, then it is an onlooker, someone else who recognizes the gravity of the situation.

Once that call is made, another trained professional at the other end of the telephone line asks critical questions and guides the caller, based on the response to those queries, how to act until the brief moments pass when an ambulance will respond to their emergency and the paramedics in charge of that ambulance will efficiently and expertly take over all the necessary reactions in response to the critical health/medical situation; the results of an accident, of the onset of a health crisis, a violent assault; whatever has occurred.

The paramedics come to the situation prepared in every conceivable way. They are experienced, having faced many and varied situations to which they have previously responded. They are exquisitely trained in medical procedures. Their vehicle is equipped with high-tech medical and diagnostic machinery, as well as drugs and medications which most medical emergency situations may call for in the perhaps desperate, interim treatment of a patient, until arrival at a hospital emergency department.

Paramedics have witnessed and been engaged in aiding the most vulnerable people caught in medical emergencies, and this continual exposure cannot help but have a traumatizing effect on their sensibilities. But these highly trained, socially and emotionally motivated professionals take as much as they can in stride and forge on, knowing that their response can be critical to whether or not a child or an adult, victims of accidents or health breakdowns, survive an episode in their lives requiring aid.

So it comes as something of a shock to be informed that these selfless, dedicated professionals are on occasion subjected to verbal and/or physical abuse; contempt for them as human beings, and belittling as health professionals, even while they are in the process of aiding the individual determined to inflict abuse on them. In an interview with a writer for the National Post newspaper, Joe O'Connor, Jennie Cubitt speaks of being kicked, punched and bitten.

She has been physically beaten, resulting in black eyes, split lips, as well as having been humiliated and assaulted sexually, even by those she has been administering life-saving protocols to. She ventilates on occasion by posting some of her miserably adverse experiences on a social media platform, popular with health-care workers such as doctors, nurses and paramedics, worldwide.

The Sun.Co.UK

Heidi, 29, was sexually assaulted by a 75-year-old patient in the back of her ambulance

A 2010 survey of over 1,300 paramedics from Ontario and Nova Scotia  reported that 26.1 percent of respondents had been subjected to physical assaults in the year previous to the survey, with over 40 percent speaking of having been physically intimidated, while close to 70 percent were verbally abused and 2.7 percent were victims of sexual assault. Drexel University in Philadelphia conducted a study in 2015, finding paramedics more than a dozen times likelier to be injured by a patient than a firefighter would be on the job.

Paramedics do have a right to defend themselves, but they will be charged with assault should they fight back. It's difficult to imagine how one might defend oneself without fighting back, actually. Yet, according to Jennie Cubitt, the prevalence of assaults against paramedics is vastly under-reported. Mot considering it, with a mental shrug, as 'part of the job', a situation she feels " . . . needs to be addressed".

In Australia, the situation of attacks against paramedics has become such a problem that the idea of body cameras was considered. The 12-hour shift is hugely stressful, and for obvious reasons, apart from the prospect of being assaulted while on the job. Yet these are the people that society depends hugely upon to respond in a timely and efficient manner, using their skills and their experience to bring people in desperate situations out of their most immediate danger.

"Nobody wants to go to work worried about being attacked," says Leeds paramedic Richard Bentley (Photo: John Gladwin/Sunday Mirror)

Tactical Combat Casualty Care

"It was undeniable that we were saving lives with the use of tourniquets."
"If you keep the blood in [the injured person's body], then the patient survived. It was a complete change in thinking [use of tourniquets]."
"The first priority [for military medics as with paramedics] was making sure that no one else got hurt [making swift interventions critical]."
Lt. Col. Colleen Forestier, physician, director of health services operations, Canadian Armed Forces

"We are always prepared. We know that these environments [dangerous or distracting landscapes detracting the paramedic from fully focusing on the patient] exist."
"Is there more stress [for the responding paramedic, trained to assess situations through 'stress inoculation training']? I don't think it's any worse, except for the volume."
Greg Forsyth, superintendent of special operations, Ottawa Paramedic Service

This discovery of a simple enough technique long in use as an effective method whereby a deep wound could be stopped by use of a tourniquet from spilling enough life-blood to sap existence, from a critical wound, turned around the spurning of tourniquets to a recognition of their indispensable status as a life-saver under battlefield conditions. Trauma treatment that recognized the utility of tourniquets among other procedures came out of observations during combat in the Vietnam War.

Those observations led to the creation of a new protocol named TCCC, Tactical Combat Casualty Care, introduced for U.S. Special Operations Forces. The protocol was designed by physicians who reviewed battlefield casualties and avoidable deaths in the recognition that utilitarian measures that would never be considered in a hospital setting had their function in a battlefield setting. A deeply penetrating review of medical response on the battlefield brought about a new blueprint for a battlefield-casualty protocol, to save lives.

That protocol has now been adopted in urban areas where paramedics are called upon to respond to medical emergencies. Toronto introduced the first such tactical paramedic unit in Canada, in 1996, followed by Ottawa, in 2003. At the present time, similar units work out of every major city in Canada. Since Ottawa's first responders are called upon for response to federal government and embassies in medical emergencies where a myriad of risks could arise, work with the military, with police and the RCMP exist as additional options.

Canada's elite military special forces -- dispatched to respond internationally when high-risk situations arise requiring an expertly trained force deployed in extraordinary venues -- adopted TCCC in 1999. Since then the protocol has been adopted for more conventional, non-military responses in the recognition that just as battlefield wounds in the extremities were recognized as the leading cause of bleeding to death, that realization extended to the outcome of peacetime critical accidents or violent attacks.

On the battlefield, as on an urban highway or  through a criminal act, the use of tourniquets stopping morbid hemorrhaging was vital to maintaining life, and as such was prioritized as first-response treatment. Tourniquets now make their presence on all ambulances, as well as being carried by tactical paramedics. Gauze impregnated with blood coagulation agents and intraosseous IV (injecting drugs or fluid into the bone marrow) represent additional new rapid response aids.

These especially highly-tuned tactical paramedics must be prepared to face extraordinary situations, bringing their training and personal protective equipment into play. Where high levels of threat exist, as represented by their presence at an active crime scene or where unstable situations prevail, the tactical paramedics are skilled in appropriate response, including following the command of police partners and knowing how to proceed with direct and indirect threats complicating situations.

Tactical paramedics wear a 25-pound ballistic vest. They carry with them over 50 pounds of additional equipment, including collapsible stretchers, infuser for IV fluids, surgical tool kits, bleeding/hypothermia kits, hemorrhage and respiration kits, dressings, first aid kits and various other complex medical-response baggage to ensure they are fully capable of responding to a variety of emergency situations.

They must be extremely physically fit, aside from being well-trained and capable of responding under extremely stressful situations. This is obviously no career for the faint of heart. These professional first-responders learn to instantly form an action plan and use their expert qualifications as medics to treat for critical injuries and prepare patients for transport to hospital. Lives hang in the balance.