Kicking off this week’s news is a look at how we work towards prevention of injury. One of the things we’re supposed to be actively involved with, as healthcare professionals, is prevention of injury. Many of the things we run into in the field are related to a preventable event. It might be someone not wearing a helmet when riding a bicycle or riding a skateboard, as in this article. It could be something like drunk driving prevention programs or information on preventing childhood illnesses.
Injury Prevention Programs
All of those are important things we should be involved with but getting started in prevention in your communities can be daunting even with a lot of resources out there. This news item, out of Oregon, is about a patient becoming an advocate for prevention.
A young skateboarder was involved in traumatic brain injury while skateboarding without a helmet. They were expecting him not to recover at all, however, he defied those odds and came back from the severe brain injury, eventually attending college. He has also become a vocal advocate for helmet use.
There’s a lot of things out there I know you see. There are youths skateboarding and biking without helmets. The numbers on helmet use in those activities is abysmally low and it’s something that we can become actively involved with in out communities. We can improve helmet use through education and through information sessions and talking to students one-on-one.
Creative Prevention in Your Community
Perhaps you can sponsor an event where an active member of these activities comes back and says, “Look, I almost died because of this. Wear a helmet. You can still have just as much fun and live to enjoy it.”
I think this is important, to advocate for prevention in your community. We will continue to do what we need to do to lower those preventable calls, keeping us available for ambulance calls for heart disease, for cardiac arrest, for motor vehicle accidents that occur. Yes, all those things have some prevention aspects associated with them, too. We can take some of the strain off of our systems by being involved with prevention in our communities.
I urge you to check out this article. It is quite extensive and talks about the extreme injuries this individual suffered. The article goes on to talk about him being a strong advocate now for helmet use in skateboarding and other extreme activities and I think this is something that we can become more involved within our own communities.
Follow-up on the links for this news item and all the links for news and additional resources in the shownotes for this episode — EMS Adenosine Med Review and Episode 315.