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This week on the EMS Leadership Podcast we find out why EMS personnel are zombies and doing EMS shift work is like being chronically depressed.
Want to participate in the research? Click here to contact Dr. Patterson
Featuring:
Chris Montera
Gary Wingrove
Dr. Daniel Patterson
Ben Dengerink
First off, I just want to thank you for these great Pod casts. I recently started listening to them and I am now addicted and wished that you could do more than one a week (even though that would be quite difficult as I can imagine). After listening to this pod cast and a few other ones in which you bring up the number of shift hours that most of us work, as in 24 hour and 48 hour rotations I noticed how much most of you seem to be against them, as I am in the fact for fatigue and other associated problems. One of the reasons I would think that no matter how much data that is pulled out of research, like Dr. Pattersons, we will have such a hard time getting away from these long shifts, for as much as I hate to say it, is pay. I tend to work the longer shifts and prefer them because it opens up my week for more Overtime or if there is no OT available, I can pick up more hours at my per diem job. I would prefer just to do a 40 hr work week, but as many of the people that I work with that is not enough to pay all the bills and we need to pick up the extra hours to really make ends meet. I would like to think that if most of us could make end meet a little easier with just the 40 hr weeks we would have no problem doing just 8 hr shifts like the rest of the normal world.
Again I thank you for these wonderful pod casts, and they do bring up alot of important issues that alot of us never really think about.
–Dan