MyGriefToolbox.ca helps paramedics respond to palliative care calls and expands their capacity to provide quality care.

The first seven modules provide paramedics with:

• Tactics to support patients and families in acute grief before and after a death.
• Strategies to intervene sensitively.
• Guidance to constructively manage work-related grief and the other stresses of working with people at end of life.
• There is also a module for your friends and family to help them understand and respond to the stresses of your career.
• Your words and actions matter. They significantly impact your patients and their families and have the potential to make a positive (or negative) impact for years to come.

Remember when you could bring a page of notes into your math exam? Having all the formulas written out in your teeny-tiny scribble really helped not to forget that r was squared and c was a constant equal to the speed of light.

Now you've got a similar tool integrated into the Ontario Paramedic Clinical Guide.

The new tool isn't for math, though. The Ontario Base Hospital Group put the key highlights for applying the prehospital Canadian Triage and Acuity Score (CTAS) to your adult patients into graphic form.

The Ministry of Health has published a partial revision to the Advanced Life Support Patient Care Standards (ALS PCS) that will come into force on Monday, November 23, 2020.

Where will you find October MedicNEWS when it's December? It's in the MedicNEWS archive, of course! 

We've put back issues of MedicNEWS in the Resources tab on the menu. If you're searching for a topic we've covered or want to flip through old issues, check out the MedicNEWS archive.

You'll find a major focus on palliative care with this year's online Fall CME. Giving you a better knowledge about this patient population will help in care whether or not your paramedic service goes on to implement the new care pathways that the Ottawa Health Research Institute plans to introduce through the Paramedics Providing Palliative Care Project. We've included a discussion forum in MedicLEARN to help support the lessons' content.

The COVID-19 pandemic is affecting almost everything in our lives and clinical practice … even medication supplies!
Increased demand is fueling medication shortages in some cases. In other cases, the active ingredient is not available locally or manufacturing has slowed down.
All of these lead to the same results: medication is harder to supply.

In early April 2016, the RPPEO introduced a new tool for Paramedics wishing to report a concern or variance. The Self Report form has been used just over 1300 times to report concerns, variances, and most importantly to help improve patient safety for everyone involved. A very big thank you to everyone who has contributed over the past 4 years.

It is time to retire the Self Report form. In its place the RPPEO is launching a new tool, the Patient Safety Incident Report. This new tool will also replace the Patch Failure tool, and allow for paramedics to report on:

1. Patient Safety Incidents
2. Good Catch/Near miss
3. Hazards
4. Documentation Issues
5. Patch Failures