Williston Fire Department adopted Handtevy, an app that calculates pediatric medication doses by age and size. Senior firefighter Tony Symanskas says it cuts on-scene stress and automatically logs what was given to hospitals. The department is among the first in the state to use it.
In the world of a first responder, time is of the essence, and one of the more challenging types of calls often involves children. Wilson Fire Department senior firefighter Tony Symanskas spoke exclusively with our own Torrance Kosher about an app that will help first responders when it comes to a pediatric emergency. Take a look.
This new app is going to save a lot of lives.
Senior firefighter Tony Symanskas is talking about Hand Tevy. It's an app focused on the smallest of patients.
It's essentially an app based resource guide for us. So when we get a call, let's say for a five year old pediatric patient, we're able to pull up a 5 year old on the app and it lists out all the correct dosaging for that patient, no matter what the issue that they're having.
Tony says responding to pediatric calls is one of the more challenging parts of his job. But with this new app, the job just became a little bit easier.
Before we had this program, we would get to the scene and be like, okay, we have a kid in front of us. We have to pull out this length based test, see what medicines we need to give. Then we have to do the mathematics in order to get the right dosaging for that size patient.
Szymanskas and fellow firefighter Nate Picard spearheaded this effort. With it being the first in the state, he hopes more departments follow almost.
Totally customizable to how the department wants it. We can lay it out specific ways, which is really nice.
It does come with a modest cost, but he says it's worth it having.
That stress alleviated with the use of this app now, and this resource is immense.
All the information can then be passed along to medical staff at the hospital.
Once we acknowledge the medications we give and the equipment we give it, time stamps it into the report for us and we can upload it into our patient report and then discharges off to the hospital.
Torrance GoEscher Local 22 News, Williston fortunately.
No pediatric calls have come in since the department launched the app, but last year the Williston Fire department responded to 30 of them. Those interested in contacting semantics about the program can go to our website, myshamplainvalley.com for his information.
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