When a 911 call came in saying a woman in Nashville was experiencing sudden labor, emergency operator Kaitlyn Kramer says her training kicked in as she successfully coached the expectant mom and bystanders through delivering a healthy baby boy.
Audio of the July 7 call reveals Kramer’s calm voice guiding the process even as the voices on the other end grew frantic as the mother’s water broke and the baby’s head started crowning.
Kramer is a training officer for Nashville’s Department of Emergency Communications.
Training? Don’t they have like checklists or cheat sheets for cases like this?
I mean yeah probably but a big part of training for this kind of thing is knowing how to find the information you need and what to do with that information. A bunch of nursing school was learning to Google things properly and select good sources like the CDC or research libraries like pubmed or even how to look up manufacturers instructions on YouTube.
One time a patient came in with special perforated mouth stickers to keep his jaw shut but still be able to breathe and I had to look up the manufacturers manual to make sure it was positioned right because I was also giving sedatives and wanted to make sure I was putting the breathing hole in the right spot before I reduced his drive to breathe.
One time I even Googled our brand of IVs to see what hub color coordinated with what gauge because the nurse who placed it forgot to document that but I needed to know if the bore was big enough for the meds I was giving.
All super useful information but you need to know where it is, what parts are particularly important, and how to translate the words on a page to actual patient care, and in this case, translate them to the patient AND lay caregiver.
“Push.” said the 911 operator calmly.
