Long story short, I was chatting with an acquaintance who claimed he worked for his city’s (Minneapolis area) emergency services. One of his duties was to clean and re-stock ambulances between emergency calls. He shared a “fact” with me that seemed kind of logical and clever to me while at the same time sounding like utter BS. I thought I would run it by the dope members.
According to “Bob”, all of the consumable supplies and most of the small gear the ambulance crews use are stored in three large removable modules, two on one side and one on the driver’s side. Each of these modules are slotted into racks in the bay wall and can be quickly removed and replaced. As described to me, suppose the medics are transporting a badly injured person. Lots of supplies used, lots of fluids and not-quite fluids spewed around. When Bob gets the ambulance, the first thing he does is remove these modules entirely and sets them aside. What’s left in the ambulance can be cleaned relatively quickly and easily without having to deal with a large number of individual slots and trays. Once the ambulance is cleaned, Bob then grabs a freshly cleaned and restocked set of modules from the storage rack and slots them into the bay. The ambulance is now ready to go back into service. Only after this is done does Bob turn his attention back the modules he originally removed, cleaning and restocking them before putting them onto the storage racks.
Supposedly, this system greatly reduced turn around time. It kind of makes sense but it also sounds fabricated to me. I have not been in enough ambulances to usefully comment but the few I have seen don’t use anything like this. During the weekend I spent in Minneapolis, I had no need of ambulance services so I can’t comment on their specific practices. I didn’t think to ask Bob at the time but I wonder if the consumables include pharmacologicaly interesting drugs, that might be of interest to thieves? If true, it seems unlikely that they would be this casual about them.
What say ye of the dope? Does this pass the smell test?
It sounds quite reasonable to me. Why do you think they’re being casual? I suspect the modules, themselves, are locked if they contain “desirable” drugs. I’d think they’re more at risk while the paramedics are out of the ambulance treating someone.
While it doesn’t seem implausible, it’s not what every ambulance has.
I haven’t worked on an ambulance, but I did do a 12-hour shift on one for my EMT training a number of years ago, and one of the things I did during that shift was clean the back of the bus after a particularly bloody patient. I distinctly remember cleaning blood from the ceiling with bleach, wondering how exactly it got there (our patient’s wounds were bandaged before getting to the ambulance, but there was a lot of blood and a lot of thrashing around.) There were also no removable modules on this model of ambulance, the shelves and cabinets were bolted to the wall. It sounds plausible that such a design would be useful, and I would think the links above describe such a design.
So for certain, some cleaning happens during a shift rather than after. That said, it probably also gets cleaned after a shift - I don’t know about that part, but since we had 4 or 5 hours left in our shift after that incident we couldn’t keep the ambulance unsafe for more patients.
As far as the drugs carried by ambulances, they’re not a lot of the stuff you’d want to try getting high off of, but they might be of some value, so when the ambulance is open and being cleaned, it’s probably in a locked or gated or well-populated and well-lit area (we cleaned ours in a busy hospital parking lot, and it was regularly parked in a gated and fenced facility with security guards between shifts.) Mostly because people do dumb things sometimes, especially those that would try to grab drugs or needles from somewhere.
There are a couple posters who have worked on ambulances - St. Urho and others - they might come by to provide more information. The story passes the smell test for me, even if it’s outside my personal experience.
I also can’t speak for ambulances, but this system has been used in hospitals for decades.
So called “crash carts” are used to respond to emergency calls throughout the hospital. They are also present in many ICU and emergency rooms.
They are usually purpose made wheeled storage carts similar to mechanics tool carts. They are stocked exactly the same, everywhere in the hospital, depending on their purpose. When used they are removed and replaced immediately with a stocked replacement. They are restocked exactly as before by central supply.
He seems to be implying there is some kind of modular racking that can be easily pulled ans swapped all at once. Even the “modular looking” stuff that DCnDC posted is not really easily swappable on the fly, but not a huge deal to swap out the pictured suction unit for another removing the whole back plate instead of having to disassemble the whole unit but not like you swapped them out every shift, just as needed for servicing.
Ambulances carry alot of stuff but even some of the messiest calls ever we didnt need more than a typical grocery store hand basket of stuff to replenish, pulling out whole racks would be a bigger PITA than just replenishing I have run 5-6 calls back to back with no restock needing a variety of equipment without running out.
In my day it was common for us to restock from the hospital. When we dropped a patient at the ED, we would go to the stock room and grab replacements for what we used and there was a little peel n stick billing label on each one. We stuck those labels on a provided card and the card was attached to the patients paperwork at the hospital before we left. That way the hospital handled billing alot of our consumables, and just replaced the consumables in question.
In most respects, an apt analogy. Ambulances carry a much broader set of equipment and more volume. You could say an ambulance is a huge self propelled crash cart. to run with the analogy the OP seems to be implying the equivalent of having prestocked crash cart drawers and just swapping drawers when a used cart comes in. Most likely that is not the case and the drawers are checked in detail and missing items replaced.
The OP is referring to employees who basically wash and stock but are not “medical personell” per se. Many people who land in such positions are wannabees who flunked out of EMT programs or are ineligible for licensure due to criminal history or may be emotionally unsuited to the nature of the work.
We caught more than a few telling stories to friends and family like they were in the field, not under a pile of checklists and cases of bandaging material in a back corner of the station. Many will do anything to “glorify” a basic stock clerk job.
I certainly don’t know if he was lying or not. My suspicious nature combined with his generally squirrelly manner just set off my BS alarms. If he had told me the sky was blue, I might have asked for a cite.
It’s worth noting that if the described story is the interesting part of his job, he’s probably not too high on the food chain there. He certainly didn’t describe himself as any kind of medically trained first responder.
