Welcome.

Welcome, traveller of the interwebs.  You have washed up on the shores of the brand-new, sparkly AmboFOAM blog.  This blog is the latest and greatest in a long line of FOAM (Free, Open Access Medical Education) blogs.  I have been inspired by the luminaries of blogging and podcasting such as Scott Weingart, Cliff Reid, Minh Le Cong, Ryan Radecki, Dave Newman and Ashley Shreve, Michelle Lin, the team at Life in the Fastlane and so many more to start a blog for those of us involved in emergency medicine in the field (the drivers of the Blue Light Taxis).  Insomnia may have also played a part.

I am an intensive care paramedic who has been in the field for essentially my entire adult life.  I am an unabashed geek who loves reading about, thinking about and talking about medicine, especially as it pertains to the wilds of EMS.  I believe that paramedics do indeed practice medicine.  This does not by any stretch mean that I equate us to physicians.  However, we assess, diagnose and treat patients according to the best available standards to which we are authorised.  We do this in a completely uncontrolled environment with little or no support, potentially intervening in life threatening and life altering situations.  Many of us carry out high risk interventions on a regular basis that are typically the domain of emergency or critical care/intensive care doctors.  Because of this I think that it behoves us to go beyond the training we have initially received and attempt to apply the same rigour to our practice that we would expect from physicians.

So my intention is that this will become the foremost ambulance/EMS centred blog on the interwebs, full of amazing pearls of wisdom, cutting edge research and robust discussion.  However, as we know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions (or maybe frozen door to door salesmen) so I suspect that this blog will turn into a sporadic, half-arsed, vaguely offensive collection of irrelevant anecdote based on nothing more than poorly remembered, poorly understood teaching from years of ambulance driver dogma.  We shall see…

While I have been inspired by a pantheon of amazingly talented emergency and critical care physicians, I unfortunately lack the mental horsepower my heroes have.  So I shall do my best to emulate them, but please do not be disappointed when I don’t measure up.  I am, after all, merely an ambulance driver.  However, I would like to think that I can reach out in a similar fashion to my colleagues, particularly those new to the field, and perhaps (if nothing else) instil in them a little of the passion I have for learning from these amazing teachers we are now able to have such easy access to.

So, welcome, I hope you enjoy the stay and I’ll try to keep things interesting for you.

Robbie