December 2004 Letters

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Mail: EMS, 7626 Densmore Ave.
Van Nuys, CA 91406-2042
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We received an overwhelming response to Mike Smith’s Beyond the Books column, What’s Up At the Airport?, in the July 2004 issue of EMS. We appreciate your input on the issues Mike raised, as well as the effort he has taken to respond to everyone’s comments (see Mike’s comments in italics).

—Ed

I wanted to reply to Mr. Smith’s ill-informed article regarding airport paramedics. Upon my initial reading, I figured I needed to simply put down the magazine and walk away, as mindless venting of spleen does nothing to advance the argument. Several days on, I’m still a bit miffed, but hopefully able at this point to present a cogent debunking of his assertions.

Let me begin by stating that I’m not here to defend the indefensible, and the tale he told regarding the paramedic who supposedly just had to try that tube, despite all the clinical evidence, pretty much falls into the indefensible category. By the same token, however, it is indefensible to extrapolate three anecdotal incidents into a series of blanket generalizations regarding paramedics who work at airports.

I am an EMS professional at Washington Dulles International Airport, and the opinions in this letter are my personal observations. This airport and Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport are both governed by the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, which operates a public safety program that, for all intents and purposes, functions just about the same as any municipalities. At Dulles, we serve approximately 20 million passengers per year, which breaks down to about 55,000 per day. Add 10–15K for the airport/airline employees and another 15–20K or so for the folks who work in the areas around the airport proper—and to whom we also respond on a regular basis—and you come up with about 90,000 potential patients per day. I haven’t even tried to factor in the numbers who pass by daily on the highways adjacent to the airport or the people in the surrounding hotels.

We are a full-service department, and we do everything every other mid-sized city department does, with the added responsibility of dealing with aircraft firefighting. We also have our own hazmat and technical rescue teams, and we staff our own communications center. I’m not going to try to pretend that we’re FDNY—we’re not. But neither are we a department that in a busy year runs only 400 calls. The call volume averages 10–12 on any given day at Dulles, and it is not uncommon to run 15 or more, most of which are EMS calls.

OK—enough general information. The first statement I’d like to address is the one made by Mr. Smith’s attorney/paramedic friend, who stated that “Once is an event, twice might be a coincidence and three times is a pattern.” Well, not so fast. Now, I will admit to not knowing how many airport-based paramedics there are in the U.S., nor do I know what sorts of systems they function in, whether or not their systems are progressive, etc. I’ll be conservative in my estimate. Let’s say there are 800 airport-based paramedics in all of the U.S. Mr. Smith had three bad experiences. That works out to a whopping total of less than one-half of one percent. This example is precisely why anecdotal evidence isn’t used by anyone to make a serious point. It just doesn’t bear up under scrutiny, unless one has had a very large number of these incidents. To use another example: It would be easy—although intellectually lazy—to say that all U.S. military prison guards in Iraq engage in prisoner maltreatment, based upon the Abu Ghraib affair. It would also be wrong and would border on the slanderous.