This year is quickly becoming the opioid/EMS negligence year. What happened to the good ol’ days of news involving emergency medical services (EMS) was always something positive? Where did we go off the rails? The latest story involves both fentanyl and negligence. Veronica MacArthur has filed a lawsuit against Hermon Volunteer Rescue & First Aid Squad alleging that if her brother, Tyson MacArthur had received Narcan in a timely manner he could have survived his overdose.
Well, at first you think that this could have been caused by any number of events considering it involved a volunteer agency. How far did the personnel have to travel to get to the station? What time of day was the call? Was the emergency medical technician (EMT) by himself for a period of time, or maybe even the entire call? Crazy things happen in rural EMS.
But then you find out that the EMT agreed to surrender his EMS license and never reapply to be an EMT in October 2022. The Maine Board of Emergency Medical Services determined that the EMT involved, Clarence Merchant, falsified his documentation regarding how long CPR was administered to the patient. Merchant reportedly told his partner to stop administering CPR after no more than 6 minutes, 20 minutes of attempted resuscitation is the standard, along with ensuring the CPR is “high-quality,” and ALS providers are expected to administer 3 rounds of advanced cardiac life support (ACLS) medications, while ruling out the H&Ts.
Merchant made conflicting statements in his report stating no resuscitation was attempted. He also documented that 18 minutes of CPR was provided. The article does not tell us if Narcan was administered, but even it was it does not do any good without chest compressions to circulate it. It was also determined that Merchant did not disclose he was convicted of criminal charges on his initial application for certification and his two subsequent applications for recertification. I know someone who did that many years ago in Arizona, he barely kept his EMT certification.
So aside from the fact that Merchant reportedly falsified his documentation there is another issue. Deviating from protocol. When you deviate from protocol without permission you are no longer protected by the license of your medical director. You are also prescribing care and we do not do that. That is well outside of our scope of practice. Most people know that if we deviate from protocol we lose that protection, but few realize that little issue with prescribing care. And that opens us up to an entirely new world of liability.
MacArthur is reportedly seeking $1 million dollars in compensatory and punitive damages. That’s a lot of money for an agency with a $300k operating budget.
If you would like to learn more about patient care reports (PCRs) join us in EMT L2 Crew Resource Management and EMS Research!
Reference:
Harrison, J. (2023, Jan. 5). Wrongful death claim filed against former Maine EMT, volunteer squad. EMS! Via Nagor Daily News. Retrieved from https://www.ems1.com/ems-protocols/articles/wrongful-death-claim-filed-against-former-maine-emt-volunteer-squad-s10DyooX2ICnvb5k/.
