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Tuesday, 01 March, 2022

Do we need paramedics

When do paramedics work? The previous article mentioned that paramedics are a profession that provides pre-hospital and emergency medical services.

Paramedics, based on the general perception, seemingly need the paramedic only when a medical emergency occurs.

In reality, the medical emergency response occurs every day, ranging from medical emergencies due to deadly diseases to traffic accidents which occur 110,000 incidents/year (based on traffic accident data for 2011 – 2021).

In traffic accidents, victims are divided into 3, namely: Fatality, serious injury (including permanent disability), and minor injuries. The total number of victims resulting from traffic accidents, on average every year is 150,000 or 400 people/day.

Combined all the numbers from traffic accidents, deadly diseases, and pandemics, in a day (based on available data) > 700 people need pre-hospital medical services.

The right question is not about the needs of the paramedic, it is about the capability and the right question "is the number of paramedics in Indonesia sufficient?".

Traffic Accidents and Paramedics

Indonesia is a huge country with a road length of more than 544 thousand kilometers (2020 data) and upcoming new roads of > 2000 km in 2024. 140 million motorized vehicles (a combination of motorbikes, cars, buses, and trucks transporting goods). Those facts have exposed Indonesia high-risk road safety country.

With the geographical conditions and stretch the roads in all provinces in Indonesia, there is an unequal development of first responder infrastructure to support traffic accidents. With challenging geographical conditions, making first respond to medical emergy challenging.

In a review https://newnaratif.com/stretched-thin-inside-jakartas-ambulance-service/ told the story of the challenging situation faced by the medical services and ambulance services, as off today pandemic situation, their duties will increase although the limitation remains to exist.

The readiness of paramedics is a challenge by itself, where periods of the covid-19 pandemic, deadly illness, and traffic accidents continuously occur within 24 hours.

With the limited number of ambulances and paramedics, the workload becomes overloaded and becomes a risk for paramedics.

They are not robots

Work shift rotation pattern for 24 hours, alternately, but often still have to stay alert because the situation has forced them to standby to support.

A worst-case scenario, judging from the experience in Indonesia, where a traffic accident occurred and resulted in many victims, at the same time the number of victims of the Covid-19 pandemic rose while 100 km away from the first responder center the natural disaster, a volcanic eruption, is occurred at the same time.

This situation could suddenly be topping the existing workload and become remarkably overloaded, making all these loads burden the paramedic’s shoulder.

Considering the above situation, this is the reason why paramedics will continue to become "superheroes" and continue to provide medical services to respond the medical emergency:

1. Traffic accidents that happen every day

2. The victim is sick from a deadly disease

3. Victims of the C-19 pandemic

Counting some of the paramedics is also a victim of the COVID-19 pandemic, significantly reducing the availability of paramedics but the workload still tends to increase due to the high number of traffic accidents.

Paramedics are human beings who had tired and stressed, but on the other side, the duty and responsibilities as professional paramedics remain.

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