The paramedics arrived and walked slowly down the length of the pool to the gym. This was procedure, they later told me, they didn't want to run and cause alarm.
You're likely talking a 10 second delay. A typical non-Olympic sized swimming pool is about 25 yards. At 3 mph, that's about 19 seconds. At 6 mph, it's about 9 seconds, at 12 mph, 5 seconds.
10 seconds may be the difference between life and death, but it's also only 10 seconds. You can pick up and lose 10 seconds quite easily. If they drove from 1 mile away, 10 seconds is the difference between 35 and 40 mph, or 60 and 70 mph. They could have saved 50 seconds if they drove 70 instead of 35; should they have?
10 seconds can be the difference between life and death, but sometimes it's not. In this case, the temporarily deceased waited an extra 10 seconds an came through it with no lasting damage at all. I'm hoping that someone, somewhere did the math on this, and determined that haste causes more problems -- either when an EMT trips and falls and injures himself, or when an EMT trips and falls and ends up taking twice as long to reach the injured person anyway, or when the EMT rushes to the injured patient and forgets the AED in the ambulance, or when the EMT administers the wrong treatment in his haste -- than it solves.
Granted, if my loved one died 10 seconds before the EMTs arrived, I might have some lingering anger, and if I died while watching EMTs slowly, nonchalantly walk towards me, my dying thought might be "Fuuuuuuuck yoooooooou EMTs", but from the perspective of a detached observer it makes perfect sense.
My normal walking pace is 2 miles/hour (and I don't think I'm slow). That's about 1 yard/second, so 25 seconds at a normal pace, and the article said 'slowly'.
I don't know if they're doing the right thing for the patient or not; just that that was the surprising info in the article, for me.
Huh. Maybe the discrepancy came out of going by the hour it takes to walk to somewhere 2 miles away in the city, with the taxicab metric plus occasional stoplights mattering more than I thought.
People who deal with emergencies professionally, and especially their non-expert political bosses and their lawyers, spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about panicked reactions by the general public, a phenomenon that is almost entirely fictional.
For the sake of 10 seconds, it is better to have a cool, collected paramedic arrive than a rushed and out of breath one. Keeping things calm and orderly rather than frantic is beneficial in an emergency situation.
At least with a pool, you'd want them to be careful. It is a slippery surface, and a fall could easily incapacitate an EMT, or destroy life-saving equipment.
Edit:
As for walking in general, it could also be because they wouldn't want a crowd to form which could obstruct them should they need to evacuate you more quickly.
We talked about this in a CPR class once. The biggest reason paramedics don't run is to avoid injury, which would obviously impede their ability to help.
That makes sense if the area around the pool is slippery. It's just that given the tremendous downside of risking the victim's life or brain damage, it seems that the paramedics wouldn't be risking much by hustling a little, rather than "walking slowly".
Unless it was really slippery, or if they thought someone was going to flip out to the point where it seriously interfered with the CPR, taking your time doesn't seem like the best thing to do for the victim.
To that I would add it gives them time to observe the scene and mentally begin work. It's not the same in seriousness, but when I was to solve an urgent IT problem I'd sit down, adjust the monitor, and roll up my sleeves before typing anything. And recently, when my baby son was falling down some stairs, I found myself calmly walking to the stairs and catching him right before he would have landed on his face. Looking back, I wondered why I didn't run since I love my son, but I realized that I might have slipped on the tile floor or dropped him in my haste.
What has happened to humans??? millions of years evolving to a truly miraculous level of efficiency and agility and we still don't think that possibly moving a little quickly to someone who's heart has stopped is a good idea? Since there were paramedics (plural) it wouldn't impede anything if they ran, and it would most certainly increase the chances of saving someone.
To me this is disgraceful, it sounds like OSHA got involved and made policy something that must surely be counter intuitive. Yes, I know the statistics of small risk- done often, but this is such a sad condition for our special to have reached when people carrying life saving equipment don't move a little faster to save someone.
There's a time to be an excited fool and leap blindly into action, and then there is a time be a professional and carefully move into place to do your work quietly and skillfully.
You wouldn't happen to use a staging server, would you?
This was probably the best point made against running, but still...
Our professional emergency response people should be capable of hustling/running over to the people that need their help while maintaining their composure and ability to think.
It is true that exertion causes a sympathetic response, but hustling/running over to someone doesn't produce such a significant sympathetic response where people can't think straight. I know that it's inherently a stressful situation, but our professionals should be able to handle that, and the additional stress of hustling/running over is negligible.
A professional attitude and good training doesn't counter basic biological processes. What do you gain from running? A few seconds, some of which you'll have to use up recovering from the run, and irrelevant bystanders thinking you're 'doing your job'. What do you lose by running? A lot - as described in the link, which has an excellent run-down.
These guys do this often. If they're running around they will eventually slip, and who knows what equipment they'll damage on the way down. Now he can't help and the problem is much worse than if it took him an extra 10 seconds to get over there.
If you infrequently enter a situation which has a low chance of hurting you, you are probably fine. But if you frequently enter those situations then it's just a matter of time before it happens to you.
If you as a paramedic rush to every patient, before long you're going to take a pointless injury and be unable to work. For the sake of saving one patient - the trivial amount of time saved by rushing rarely affects outcomes - getting injured means that while you recover, you can no longer attend dozens of other patients at all. Hardly 'miraculous efficiency'.
It might seem like common sense for the paramedic to rush. But in practice, rushing doesn't save lives.
Rule #1 in any first-responder situation is to keep the rescuer safe. There are tons and tons of examples where rushing led to mistakes that killed the rescuer AND the patient.
So don't be upset! Moving with caution is not an OSHA rule - it is best practice learned over decades of hard-earned experience.
Another reason paramedics are taught to walk around pools is simply to avoid slipping on wet floors. The additional speed isn't worth the increased risk of falling.
Poolside=wet surface; EMTs may not have been dishwashers in a previous life (where you learn the dishwasher shuffle for moving over wet surfaces). Doesn't surprise me they'd walk with care.
Yeah, that means that people's propensity to panic results in the victim having to lose more precious seconds, which could easily result in brain damage or something.
That shocks me a little.