Saw a guy stumble on street, hit his head and pass out. I called 911 and when ambulance arrived they told me to NOT call the guys wife, and they refused to accept the number when I offered it. Why?
Details: I saw a guy stumble and fall, I asked if he needed help, he said call his wife and gave me a number, but while it was ringing, he fell again, lot of blood, he’s unconscious, so I hang up and call 911. The ambulance arrives and I tell the paramedic what I saw and say I have his wife’s number but the paramedic interrupts and says “do not call her!”. The paramedics tend to the guy, who has recovered consciousness now, so the paramedics take him to the ambulance and I ask them if they need the wife’s number but they say no, we’ve got everything we need.
Why in the world did they not want the wife’s contact number? The paramedics seemed very competent about everything else, so I assume they were following standard procedure. But wouldn’t they want to have the number in case they have to ask someone about things like drug allergies or whatever?
Anybody able to explain what just happened?
I don’t know the answer, but I would have called the wife anyway.
I wonder if it had to do with privacy laws?
EMT here. It could have been HIPPA privacy laws, but it seems more likely to me (with no additional info than the OP) that the crew didn’t want her breaking her neck to get there in a hurry. If I have to take someone to the hospital code 3 (local slang for “with lights and siren going”), I always tell family to drive carefully, obey traffic laws, etc. There’s no sense in potentially causing a wreck. And spouses (of both genders) can sometimes complicate the issue when they arrive on scene. They can try to talk to the crew, which can interfere with patient care. I’ve had to tell police officers on scene with us to remove a panicking spouse because they’re too much of a distraction.
Plus, a lot of times a spouse will try to get a diagnosis/prognosis, and I don’t have any way of knowing that a lot of times. I can’t see internal injuries, for example. And injuries can look a lot worse than they are (for instance, head wounds tend to bleed a lot), which can set off more panicing.
My usual routine is to let the hospital staff call the family. The patient is usually cleaned up from blood or whatever, at least started having tests run to determine the extent of injuries, and the situation has generally calmed down.
There are exceptions, though. I once called the mother of a car crash victim. The victim was alert, oriented, and so on. She was also about 7 months pregnant.
Nitpick: HIPAA.
:smack:
HIPAA/privacy laws wouldn’t apply here. I, a ‘civilian’ (in this sense) am certainly allowed to call someone to say that their husband was injured and an ambulance just picked him up. Even more so if the the victim handed me her phone number and said ‘here, call my wife’.
As far as the ‘we’ve got everything we’ve need’ comment. It’s possible he gave the EMTs her number as well, but it would have been nice if they would have at least told you that. So, as others said, you know that they know they can (and probably will) get a hold of her when the time is right instead of you doing it anyways (on the assumption that they can’t or won’t) and now she’s frantic, doesn’t know what hospital he’s at, what condition he’s in and when she finds out she’s tearing down the roads at double the speed limit.
I’m sure the EMTs are used to ‘regular people’ ‘trying’ to help, and probably get annoyed by it once in a while but a simple ‘it’s fine, he gave it to us’ or even taking it from you and saying ‘thanks’ is miles better than, more or less, telling you to bugger off.
TL;DR, they probably already have her number and were just being a bit short with you.
Is it possible that the paramedics know the guy and his wife, and think she’s a problem?
BTW, I don’t think HIPAA restricts the actions of random acquaintances.
Perhaps they felt you were alarmed and not the best person to make the call. Or that waiting till they had some prognosis or had him stabilized, was a better idea!
Personnel at the hospital would likely have much more experience, know what to ask, how to reassure, etc, etc.
Just I guess!
I’ve gone to the emergency room before and they DID NOT WANT my current medical records! (Being as they did not have access to my doctor’s computer, I offered to log into it so they could see my recent blood tests, etc.)
I got the impression they want to do their own tests and make their own diagnosis - based on how I am at that particular moment. Not how I was last week?
Correct. Old records can be critical to have at times, but not in 99+% of the cases seen in the ER.
Wouldn’t you at least want “old records” of, say, the victim’s blood type? I mean, sure, you can just pump him full of O-neg, but aren’t results generally better with an actual match? Besides which, there’s a limited supply of O-neg available.
It seems to me that you’d also want to know about any drug allergies, though maybe the sorts of drugs typically used in the ER are only rarely allergenic?
If they want to know the patient’s blood type, they’ll type and crossmatch him in the ER. You don’t depend on old records or someone else’s say so on a blood type, ever; there’s too much at risk. And there’s a little more that goes into giving blood than just the type, other factors and things that have to be checked for.
They weren’t EMTs, and it wasn’t a real ambulance.
They were spies, possibly from the IMF, and the guy had just been drugged, and was being taken off as part of an elaborate plan where he was to be convinced he was living in the future and would give up to location of a “long buried” stash of chemical/biological/nuclear weapons. If you called his wife, it might ruin the plan.
They can test for blood type themselves, that way they can be sure it’s correct and in a much shorter time than poking through and reading unfamiliar records. Relying on someone else’s diagnosis and tests also is probably bad from a liability standpoint, if the record has the blood type wrong, and the patient dies, I’m not sure that ‘we relied on this old record he pulled up on his phone’ would protect the hospital from a malpractice suit.
“You don’t know me but your husband gave me your number. He fell down! He was in a coma! Oh my god the blood, the blood!”
“Good afternoon ma’am. This is Cindy from General Hospital intake. Your husband had an accident this afternoon. He is currently under a doctor’s care and the doctor would like a family member here to discuss his condition. Please there is no rush and make sure you get here safely. Just come in through the emergency room and we can bring you through.”
Often if it is something urgent like an impending death they will have dispatch call and have family respond to the hospital. They also know the proper way to handle it.
In the future, if the EMTs say don’t call, DON’T.
They deal with this kind of thing every day. Most of us don’t.
And 99+% of patient charts won’t have blood type info in it anyway. It is really irrelevant to the vast majority of health care delivered, even emergency health care.
Just to add on to what others have already said about this, sometimes hospitals won’t even rely on their own previous records for this info.
I work in medical records and have processed sets of records where the patient had his blood typed and crossed multiple times during the same hospital admission (as in, this was done prior to several different procedures/transfusions during the same lengthy stay at the same hospital).
It’s always interested me the relationships of hospital medical staff to the outside medical world and history of your care. I’m sure it “interests” the outside, private physicians equally, and must be at times maddening and frustrating.
Your doctor said such and such, is the best doctor in the East, not only knows the stuff but how it works with you for the past 40 years?
Tough. Your ass is ours now. If he was such a hot shot you wouldn’t be in ER now, now would you?