Preach it brother!

I hesitate to simply link to other blogs, or make comments about what another blogger is saying because frankly it makes me feel lazy. However sometimes there are issues brought up by my fellow CAP blog community members that I do feel need to be spread. One such issue was brought up by Midway-Six on his site, CAPBlog. The article, which can be found perma-linked here, is as follows.

Taken from CAPBlog:

Stop Screwing the Medics

Here's one of the many things I'm pissed off about these days...

See this picture? It's a picture of a CAP Ground Team member checking on the health of one the littlest survivors of Hurricane Katrina.

Our Teams were the first uniformed responders that 80% of the people we encountered had seen after the storm.

This particular GMT has a Paramedic License. He gets to wear a badge on his uniform that identifiers him as a medical professional.

So what medical direction is he operating under in this picture? What liability coverage does he have?

None of this was cleared up over the last year or so. The Health Services issues were once again tabled at this week's National Board meeting, reportedly due to, "concerns about medical malpractice."

Give me a break.

I've heard people say that, "We don't train EMTs in CAP." Well I've got news for them, we don't train pilots either! But we equip pilots, and we insure pilots, but we do not train them to be pilots.

So let's treat the medical professionals on the ground the same way.

We need to take the rescue part of Search And Rescue (SAR) seriously... just as seriously as the flying part. That means taking care of the boots on the ground."

Amen. Id love to say more than that, but Midway took words I've been saying for quite a while directly out of my head, I couldn't agree more.