"Hot Seat"

How does your department/service decide which person is going to be in charge of patient care each call? Level of seniority, comfort level, male vs. female?

I work for a department that they don't decide who is going to run the call until after the patient is loaded in the back of the ambulance and ready to go to the hospital.

We would decide by who was in the driver seat first. Meant the other guy was suckin...

I thought if on a BLS ride you alternated and if on an ALS ride it was the medic everytime? Me? I'd drive everytime if I could!

I was a medic, but if it was a BLS call, my EMT's needed their calls/pt contact hours, so I would let them take them. If it was ALS it was mine unless we determined that it was indeed and ALS or a BLS. ALS mine, BLS his....

Our department doesn't run an ambulance service. We work with AMR (which kinda sucks). We respond to all of their calls with them and ride in on ALS calls. However, we have a lot of stations that are in rural areas so we arrive on scene and have to wait for the ambulance for 20-30 minutes sometimes. In these situations the paramedic is always in charge until the ambulance unit arrives.