Even at my advanced age I know the value that mistakes can have on my actions.

Years ago when I first started in EMS, I realized that I could learn from mistakes

that not only I made but that others made as well.

The trick I think is to be aware enough to recognize your mistakes or those of others

so that you can actually benefit from them. At times, you may know you are doing something wrong or see something that is being done wrong and be able to have an immediate reaction or correction to the issue at hand.

Other times, you may not realize the mistake until hours or even days later. Hopefully you yourself will be aware of the mistake and not need to have it pointed out to you by others.

However, having someone else point out your mistake has various positive points.

* You get another persons view of the issue

* The feedback you get is not clouded by pride (usually yours)

* Different ways of handling the issue can be brought up and perhaps

show you better ways of handling similar situations in the future.

When someone else shows where you went wrong, don’t get defensive. Many times we are tempted to justify the mistake and not accept criticism. Listening to views of an outside party can help you to learn from your mistake and most likely stop you from making it again.

In EMS, mistakes can be life threatening. The wrong drug, the wrong treatment and even the wrong transport position can be detrimental to your patient. How do we avoid these types of mistakes?

Training and education is the primary way to avoid these types of mistakes and is also the best way to learn from mistakes. By making mistakes in a classroom or training scenario, you learn what you did wrong and get feedback from the instructors and also from your classmates. You must be open to making your errors here and learn from them with an open mind. Do not be confrontational and challenge your instructors, but listen to what they have to say and you most likely will agree with their comments. Now of course, even instructors are wrong at times, but that is a whole other article.

Often you can learn from the mistakes of others as well. As mentioned above, the classroom settings allows you as a student to step back and view others performance in a scenario based setting. By doing so you get to relax and see what is being done wrong and what you would do in your classmates place. Take note of your fellow students’ actions, point out what you feel they are lacking in and allow them to better understand what they can do better.

The classroom can also be a great place to listen to the "war stories" of your veteran instructors and "salty dog" classmates. These stories can be a fantastic way to learn from someone else’s mistakes as well.

Most stories come with a difficulty the person had to deal with or a certain call type that took a turn for the worse. If you listen closely to most of these stories, funny, horrific or otherwise, many will point out a mistake that was made and how it was corrected right on scene, or even after "when they got yelled at by the supervisor".

If you make mistakes in a real life setting, don’t deny your actions. Own up to what you did wrong and acknowledge what you will do in the future to prevent the same thing from happening. Your peers and managers will respect you more for being honest than for trying to hide a wrong action. You also will appreciate how

mistakes made by others can actually happen. No one is perfect.

Even after doing the job for years, the potential for error will always be there. It may not happen as often as is does in the beginning of your EMS career, but with new procedures, medications and expanded treatment modalities being added to our scope of practice, mistakes can be made and the challenge to be perfect is still there.

By being open to learning from our mistakes and those of others, we will become better EMS providers.

By continuing our education and training we will limit our mistakes and become better EMS professionals.

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Jim Hoffman is the owner of EMS Solutions.

He is also a contributor and publication partner

of FieldMedics The Magazine. Download your free

copy at http://fieldmedics.com/magazine

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