Your service can prohibit you from carrying any non-uniform or non-assigned items. The question is, should they? I'm gonna side with the complainers on this one. What's the big deal with employees wanting to stay in touch with the world? Everyone else does.
You think your director isn't on the phone with his wife 14 times a day and taking calls from his mother when she's low on hemorrhoid medicine? Of course he is, but he has the luxury of a desk, a line that's not tapped and a fancy door he can close for privacy.
We don't have those luxuries in the field. We're running our asses off making the money to pay his phone bill. It's OK for the scheduler and comm center to page us and call us all hours of the day and night on our cell phones when someone goes home sick, and they need an extra crew for a transport or the nursing home explodes, but when your kid has a fever, is spewing vomit on all the other kids at the daycare center and they want to get him out of there, you can't rely on the comm center to get that message to you. They're too busy lining up your next five assignments.
My service encourages us to carry a cell phone while on duty. They don't reimburse us for any costs associated with routine contact with hospitals, comm centers or other agencies unless we're involved in a command role at major incidents. Then we're reimbursed for lengthy use that places a burden on our phone bills.
I'm really sensitive about taking away any communications devices from field crews. You can never have enough ways to communicate with each other, the comm center, hospital EDs or medical control as far as I'm concerned, particularly when the portable radios my service hands out don't work in half the high-rises or remote areas we serve.
I've even activated my cell phone when my partner and I were threatened in a kitchen during a call that turned out to involve domestic violence. We were dispatched to assist a woman who reportedly fell in her kitchen. When we arrived, we found her husband had bounced her head off the floor a few times during an argument. A police unit hadn't been dispatched to the call, so I quietly speed-dialed our comm center and began talking my way out of the kitchen.
The dispatcher heard every word being said in the room and sent police units to assist us, all the while relaying situation status reports to the responding cops. I never could've received help as safely, effectively and quickly had I tried to key my radio in front of the irate husband. The sound of the repeater's squawk would've tipped him off that I was contacting someone.
During the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, many rescuers told reporters the important thing to them that terrible day was having the ability to contact their spouse, children, parents or other loved ones to let them know they were alive and uninjured. Once they got this message out, they could remain on scene and focus their efforts on treating the injured and rescuing those entrapped. The wait to call home from a working payphone would have been agony for those responders and their families.
A cell phone is as much a part of our gear now as wristwatches, trauma scissors, stethoscopes or helmets. Tell your director I said he should reconsider his stand on cell phones and pagers, but restrict crews from making personal calls while in the presence of patients, ED staff or the general public. Their pagers can be kept on vibrate-gives the crews a cheap thrill and doesn't annoy anybody in the process.
