Had a little situation this morning in which an associate needed to be taken to the ER. At first I was going to call 911, but we decided it'd be much quicker to drive the person to the ER. (so we don't have to wait on the ambulance). It didn't seem to be a life or death thing and it wasn't a physical injury, but the person probably did need to go to the ER. Anyway, since there's no management there early in the morning (before store opens), we decided to driver the person to the ER. After more employees started coming in and heard what happened, someone mentioned that what we did could've been a liability issue.
If this happened to you would you rather wait for an ambulance or drive the person to the ER? Hospital is fairly close so I'm confident we would've made it to the ER before the ambulance even arrived. What's with this liability issue? If I'm able to talk to the person and they're alert, I'm taking them to the ER. It'd be silly to pay for an ambulance ride when we have cars that work just fine. For the sake of an example, let's say the person was having a panic attack or something similar.
It has more to do with duty of care and all the fun medical mumbo jumbo with insurance and liability between Corporate HR / Legal Team, the store management, and the employees involved insurance companies and state laws based on duty of care. If you are not trained / accredited or sufficiently qualified to preform certain medical functions and you operate above scope, that can be a very serious can of worms you don't want to play with and most likely will be automatically terminated at best / SIR and a talk with Corpo / District teams at the least.
Would you trust a fully equipped and staffed EMS crew to attend to a panic attack and allow them to use their innate knowledge of medicine to keep the patient in good health on the scene, and on the way to the hospital if need be? Or would you trust Random Joe to be the driver in his truck, not qualified to do medical procedures and or make medical judgement calls, and possibly making something worse. "When in question, trust the profession" Those are true words from a Paramedic and Battalion Chief from my Disaster Service Worker training. There is a right way to do things and a wrong way. Better to trust the pros to their job then take a risk yourself and put a target on your back for management / corpo to simply say, "they were reckless with this, they are to be terminated because they presented a danger."
I have heard that legally we can not drive someone to the ER (even though the hospital is less than 5 min from our store.) An ambulance must be called as the patient has the option of refusing transport.
damn right. this person's dept head was yelling at them telling them to get back to work. WTF? really? I'd have went home and told them to F*** OFFFFFF
