Guido and his colleagues have used a Telenotarzt from umlaut for more than 30,000 calls since the firm was founded in 2014. 'The control centre mainly sends us to calls that, at first glance, don‘t really require an emergency doctor on site. This way, if an emergency happens at the same time and the emergency doctor is needed on site, he isn’t hindered.' One classic case history here is acute coronary syndrome (ACS), a range of cardiovascular conditions. Or renal colic. 'An emergency doctor always used to be called out. If everyone was busy, they called the neighbouring district. These days, we usually handle things with the Telenotarzt,' Guido says.
Just like "Emergency!"
The book "De reis van mijn leven" by Dutch radio icon Lex Harding is in the station break room. Guido speaks fluent Dutch and likes to read between alarms when he can. 'The Journey of My Life is a beautiful story about a father who spends a long time with his grown-up sons for the first time. I’ve been in the emergency services for 29 years, so the title suits me well,' Guido says. He was a volunteer volunteer paramedic and medical technician for a few years before joining full-time as a paramedic in 1998.
Further training as a teaching paramedic then followed so he could train colleagues in the Benelux tri-border region. When the job profile changed to emergency paramedic, Guido took the supplementary exam in 2019. 'This means I’ve done all the current rescue service training,' he says.
Guido first came into contact with the Telenotarzt at the Aixtra simulation centre of the RWTH Aachen University Hospital in 2006. Even before the EU-subsidised research projects “Med-on-@ix” and “TemRas” started, rescue situations in which he was given the chance to link up to an emergency doctor by radio were simulated here. 'There was a high-tech simulation manikin in the room that could speak remotely, among other things. The new challenge for me was to communicate and describe what was happening via a handheld radio to the doctor who was sitting two rooms away,' says Guido.
He compares it to scenes from the US TV series ”Emergency!“. 'Those were my first impressions of such possibilities. Obtaining approval for invasive measures hadn’t been possible in Germany until then,' he says.
Conveying what you see
In January 2021, paragraph 2a of the Emergency Paramedic Act was amended. Until the arrival of the emergency doctor or the start of further medical care, including remote medical care, emergency paramedics are now allowed to carry out “curative measures of an invasive nature” on their own responsibility to avert danger to life or significant consequential damage to the patient. 'This is the competence we’ve been struggling for in Germany for years. I’m pleased we’re awakening from the powerlessness of being unable to act in an emergency thanks to the Telenotarzt,' Guido says.