Summary: Off load delay nurses, ambulances reborn, mass casualty from the hospital's point of view, and we're going to take a look at serotonin syndrome with a revisit with our good friend Lisa Booze from the Maryland Poison Center. All that and more in this week's episode of the MedicCast. MedicCast Episode 296 Welcome to this week's episode of the MedicCast. I'm your host Jamie Davis, the Podmedic and I'd like to welcome you to the program this week. We've got a lot of good stuff, some great news items and our Tip of the Week segment where we'll be getting back together with Lisa Booze from the Maryland Poison Center to talk about something called serotonin syndrome. Something a lot of us know not a lot about, including nurses and physicians. We'll be filling you in on that with some help from Lisa later on in this episode after the news. In the meantime, I will remind you to go over to the MedicCast blog and check out all the links to the news articles and additional resource information you'll find there in the show notes link at the top of the page at MedicCast.com/blog (http://mediccast.com/blog). Click that link and it'll take you back and show you all the most recent episodes. Scroll down and go back in time all the way back to episode one of the MedicCast if you'd like so you can follow up on any information in the episode there. I also want to make sure you know you can get back in touch with me by e-mail send those e-mails into podmedic@mac.com (mailto:podmedic@mac.com). If you have a question or a comment, a suggestion or perhaps a link to a news article you'd like me to check out, I love getting those things, send them in to me and I will get back to you. I always try to return every single e-mail that comes in so keep those e-mails coming. There will be some other contact information later on this episode but in the meantime before getting to the news, I would remind you we are going to be at EMS World Expo coming up in the end of October in New Orleans (http://emsworldexpo.com). If you're in that area and you are planning on going to the Expo, make sure you come by our booth in the exhibit hall area. There'll be a place for you to sit down nearby in the social media lounge. You can sit there check out our live shows in the podcast studio next door and get something to eat. Just sit down, relax, use the free Wi-Fi and hang out with myself and the other podcasters from the ProMed network. (http://www.mediccast.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/PC-border-cmyk-150x150.jpg)We do want to thank Physio-Control (http://facebook.com/physiocontrolinc) for being the sponsor of our podcast studio all three days there. If you haven't already done so, check out their page over on Facebook. You can do that and the say thanks to them for sponsoring our shows. Also, use the Promo Code FP50 at EMSWorldExpo.com when you check out to get free exhibit hall access passes for the conference. ER Off-Load Delay Nurses You know, you can say what you like about the U. S. medical system and other countries' socialized medicine is good or bad. I'm not going to have that argument with you here. But, I do like the fact that EMS is part of their healthcare services and are included in decision-making on how healthcare is provided in those areas. In our system, EMS gets under-recognized or unrecognized in looking at how to make the system better. In this article from Canada, they are looking at the city of Greater Sudbury and the fact that they have ambulances stacking up in their emergency department (http://www.northernlife.ca/news/localNews/2012/08/11-ambulance-delays.aspx). Old Ambo into Simulator (http://www.mediccast.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/BackofAmbulance_sm1-150x150.jpg)In Daleville Virginia they have taken an old ambulance that was going to go out to pasture and get scrapped for the parts in scrap metal or whatever and they found a way to revitalize it and turn it into a useful training tool
