Brockville paramedic details perils of difficult job
BLACK EYES, SPLIT LIPS ARE PART OF A JOB THAT’S NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART
Jennie Cubitt is on vacation this week near Corpus Christi, Texas, which is a good thing, after the week she had at work recently where, among other highlights, she came in contact with a house full of drunken monks somewhere north of Brockville, Ont. The meeting was intentional: Cubitt is a paramedic in rural Ontario. The monks dialed 911 after one of their brethren split his head. He required stitches, which was fine, until he informed Cubitt and her student/partner that he couldn’t go to the hospital without his vast book collection and then tried, unsuccessfully, to urinate on them.
“As soon as we got him in the ambulance he decided we were the devil,” Cubitt says, laughing. “He refused to speak to us in English and started yelling profanities in Russian.”
The drunken monk was more or less non-violent, but not every patient is. Cubitt has been kicked, punched and bitten on the job. She has suffered black eyes — she refers to them as enduring eye “makeup” — split lips and had her private parts grabbed, more than once, including by a man she was administering oxygen to.
“I find that the worst cases of abuse don’t leave a wound,” she says. “It is the sexual assaults that are the most frustrating because it is often not brought on by people in an altered mental state, such as dementia, but by people who are disgusting.
“Most often drunks, who don’t believe women should be in uniform and don’t respect them in the field.”
Cubitt’s brush with the monk inspired her latest post on Figure 1, a popular social media platform for health-care workers. Doctors, nurses and paramedics worldwide compare cases on the website, suggesting treatments, outcomes and best-care practices. In this forum, Cubitt is an international star known to her followers as ParamedicJennie. Her most recent post featured a picture of herself sporting a black eye — not from the monk but from a previous on-the-job encounter in Leeds and Grenville counties — and a question to her colleagues: “Has this happened to you?”
The answer? Overwhelming yes, if you are a paramedic. A survey of more than 1,300 paramedics from Ontario and Nova Scotia in 2011 found that 26.1 per cent had been physically assaulted in the previous 12 months. Almost 70 per cent reported being verbally abused; more than 40 per cent cited physical intimidation, while 2.7 per cent reported being sexually assaulted. A 2016 study out of Drexel University in Philadelphia found that paramedics were more than 12 times more likely to be injured by a patient than a firefighter, and that gender was “not a meaningful predictor of patient-initiated violence.” In other words, patients will punch a female paramedic just as readily as they will punch a male.
“Women have an easier time than men, in some cases,” Cubitt says, because, for whatever reason, their presence can produce a calming effect in potentially hostile situations. By law, paramedics cannot fight back. Like any citizen, they can defend themselves, but they can also be charged with assault for touching someone who doesn’t wish to be touched. (There is greater latitude around self-preservation in the back of an ambulance: patients can be restrained by blankets or seat belts. Cubitt says the most common technique is to sit on an aggressor until the vehicle stops and then exit and wait for police.) She stresses that violence against paramedics is grossly under-reported and merely accepted as part of the job.
“It needs to be addressed,” Cubitt says.
Increasing reports of violence involving paramedics in Australia convinced one jurisdiction to experiment with body cameras. Cubitt is reluctant to embrace the idea here, fearing cameras could breach patient confidentiality and be used against paramedics who might be doing their best for a patient in a situation but not doing it by the book.
What might sound like a nightmare job really isn’t for Cubitt. The 5-foot-4, 30-yearold ParamedicJennie jokes that she has three emotional states: “hungry, sleepy and horny.”
“I don’t get too bothered by stuff,” she says, laughing. “And if that person was in an altered state when something happened — then I honestly don’t think twice about it afterwards, because they have absolutely no idea what they are doing.”
Indeed. She decompresses over a beer with her partner after a tough day, and then it is back out on the road for another 12-hour shift, doing a job she “loves,” tending to drunken monks and all types in between.
“I see people on their worst day,” Cubitt says. “Even if it isn’t something we’d consider an emergency — it is that person’s emergency — and if we can make that day even a little better, that’s the high of doing this.”
AS SOON AS WE GOT HIM IN THE AMBULANCE HE DECIDED WE WERE THE DEVIL.