Rush to Judgment: Wasting Time, Trust and People

It’s one thing to lead and another to find that people actually follow you. What makes you want to follow some people and not others? I will try to keep these tips practical and useful enough so you can use them as soon as you’ve read them.

What do you do? It’s half-past eight in the morning. After checking your messages, you’re about to leave for a critical meeting. You have another meeting scheduled right afterward. One of your paramedics, just coming off duty, confronts you about the fact that her new partner is a negligent caregiver and is abusing patients. The complainant drove for 40 minutes to see you, despite the fact that she was up all night and could have walked home from her station and gone to bed. She says her partner openly ridiculed a woman last night in front of her family and neighbors for “system abuse” after she called 9-1-1 unnecessarily. The patient had been released yesterday by a local ED after a moderate frontal-impact MVA in which her head had broken the windshield and shattered the driver’s side window of her pickup. She called when she awakened at 0100 hours with dysphagia and the worst headache of her life.

You’re exasperated. The complainant is a seasoned paramedic who is much respected in the field, and who rarely complains about anything. She says she eventually insisted on transporting this patient, and her partner became openly furious with her. The accused partner is also very experienced, but this isn’t the first time someone has accused him of blowing off a patient during the past couple of years. You know he has a disciplinary history, and you’ve heard enough. You have plenty of other things to worry about right now. You’re inclined to call him in and free up his future for him.

Answer: I know a wise old paramedic named Les Federoff, who was a union rep in one of his other lives. He once told me that anytime he got involved in a disciplinary dispute with an employer who had hurriedly punished an employee, he knew the employer was going to lose the case. “People don’t change,” he said. “There’s never a hurry to punish people. If somebody is a screw-up today, they’re going to be a screw-up tomorrow and the next week and the following month.”

Les’s point: Negative discipline is serious business. It seldom does an offender any good and it can damage his life. Sometimes you have no other choice, but you determine that with thorough research and documentation. You take as much time as you need to. Your personal feelings and your own busy schedule are irrelevant. If you’re worried that someone is a threat to the safety of your people or the public, act immediately to protect them all by suspending the accused with pay while you determine the facts. Inform him promptly of your concerns, and ask him to explain his side of the story then and there. We don’t own our certificates and we’re all accountable for our actions.

There’s nothing worse than the realization that your agency has a dangerous paramedic who is free to practice because you did a sloppy investigation or failed to document it fairly and thoroughly. (Except maybe the prospect of overreacting to a comment by a tired colleague who may have needed some sleep, and terminating her partner without due process.)

The unbudgeted costs of a few days’ pay and benefits might be regrettable. But sometimes they’re just part of the price of fairness. And the embarrassment of botching a job as important as discipline can be keen, lasting and far-reaching. The hidden costs of that kind of embarrassment are costs that none of us can afford.