I was at a marathon race today and one of the participants went DOWN! Luckily a friend of mine caught him. When I walked by several minutes later I stopped to see if medical staff were already there but there weren't. I'm a third year medical student in clinical, have wilderness first responder training and have worked first aid for a handful of sporting events over the years. I am certainly no paramedic but at the time I was the only person with literally any training.
My friend told me what happened and then I started assessing the patient. I assessed his mental status, HR, RR and found some glucose to rub along his gums. He was A&Ox1, but normal vitals. There really wasn't anything we could do from there. Two race medics arrived after 5 minutes and I tried to tell them he was A&Ox1 and that we had been giving him glucose, but they immediately and started talking to the patient.
I thought okay, that's totally valid he is making sure the patient is okay.
The second medic stepped over and I tried to fill her in. I mention I was a clinical medical student so that maybe she would listen when I said the patient was A&Ox1 with a HR of 120 5 minutes ago. She just ignored me. I am totally on board with not wanting help from random people, but it felt a little weird that they didn't even want to hear anything from me. (I thought it would at least be relevant that we were giving him glucose and that he had been A&Ox1 since he collapsed (without head trauma)).
So I stepped back and went to work with some of the race coordinators to track down this man's family. We were lucky enough to get his wife on the phone. We gave her an update and then I asked a couple of general questions about past medical history. I got that he had no known medical conditions or surgeries, he had't taken any medications in the past week and that he had been downing electrolyte drinks for 24 hrs. I tried to share this with the medic who waved me off. I then later tried to share with the paramedic who was taking the patient for transport.
I tried to find a moment/pause but the two times (once to the race medic and separately to the paramedic) I tried to say anything they said hold on and then never circled back.
I've heard that ems doesn't usually like when people get involved and interrupt their flow, but I also felt like knowing what his prior state was might have been helpful? And more importantly the lack of known medical conditions, medications and known ingestion of large amounts of electrolytes seemed pretty relevant to his treatment plan.
I was thinking because he was A&Ox1 and his wife wasn't gonna get to the hospital for a minute that the only person who could give this information to the ED physician was the paramedics. Given what I learned during my ED rotation, knowing those three things would change the initial differential and could influence the work up at the hospital.
Was I wrong to try and share this information with the medics/paramedics? Is there a better way to try and share information like this with ems in the future? Did I do something that was problematic/I should avoid in the future? It just seemed like all of the medical staff was fully dismissive and incredible annoyed with me.