St. Albans firefighters and EMTs carry a lot of heavy equipment around to help keep people safe. Now they have a much lighter tool to work with as well.
“When we do a treatment ‘is your pain better or worse, the same?’ and I thought ‘that’s not good enough’ we have to have something that we can use to communicate more effectively,” says Lt. Chris Collins with the St. Albans Fire Department.
So Collins was brought on board to help develop the “EMT communication card” that will help those who may be deaf, hard of hearing, have and intellectual disability or maybe autism communicate with first responders. “A lot of times they can’t verbalize their symptoms, but they can point to a picture easier than they can verbalize what’s going on with them we found using pictographs is a more effective way of communicating with those folks as well,” Collins adds.