The BIG Announcement

Well, I’ve been hinting about it enough for the past few weeks/months, I even mentioned it on the EMS Garage Podcast this week. I think it’s well overdue that you all found out about the BIG plan as well.

As you are all aware, Happy Medic and I have developed a bit of a friendship since this blog began. We have had multiple posts linking to each other’s blogs and have wrote considerable numbers of words comparing the way emergency care is delivered in the UK and the USA. As well as blogging, we have been bombarding each other with questions via email, and one day we had the bright idea of actually experiencing for ourselves what the others service is like, and hence “The Project” was born.

So, what is” The Project”, I hear you all say!

Towards the end of this year (October/November), I will be travelling out to Happy Medics corner of the world and “riding out” with him as he goes about his day to day work as a Fire Fighter Paramedic in San Francisco, then as I leave to come back home, he will accompany me back over to the UK to spend some time working alongside me. We spent some time talking about how this was all going to work, and how we would blog about our experiences, when we thought, why not go even further?

The end result to various negotiations is that a BBC film crew will be coming out with me to film the whole experience, including Happy Medic coming back over here!

We hope to experience the good and maybe not so good of each other’s services, and learn from each other the difficulties that are both unique and common to paramedics across “the pond”.

I am really looking forward to experiencing the workings of a Fire based EMS system, along with the perceived difficulties that we all hear about privatised health care. Is it all bad? or are there some good things that may find their way over to the UK? I am also looking forward to showing Happy Medic, how we do things over here.

Socialised healthcare is pretty much top of the agenda in US politics at the moment, certainly for healthcare workers. It’s going to be fascinating to see what HM actually thinks of it, as well as our systems of not having to take all patients to hospital, and our ability to refer on to other health care providers. I am sure that there are going to be many, many things that are incompatible between our two systems, but maybe there will be some that do work and that can improve things even further for all of our emergency patients in both of our countries.

When the trip does happen, I am planning on posting daily, so that you can be well ahead of the crowd, in seeing how we get along.

One thing is for sure, Happy Medic willl be speaking some wonderful Geordie phrases by the end of it – Why Aye Man!!!

It’s going to be one hell of a ride, I can’t wait!!