As the summer wanes, and kids return to school, you, as an emergency responder, may be lulled into believing that the risk of drowning has subsided or at least diminished significantly. As the fall approaches, fewer people are engaged in water sports, vacations are winding down, and swimming is less of a focus.

It was a typical hectic Monday. Traffic was backed up; the young father was running late, and he was scheduled to give a presentation at the office in less than an hour. At the last minute, his wife asked him to drop their two-year-old off at daycare. As he sat in traffic, he reviewed his presentation in his head. When traffic finally got moving, he made a beeline for the office.

Anybody in emergency medical services knows the critical role pre-planning plays in the success of your operations. As an emergency responder, you must be ready to confront a wide range of critical situations. It is not enough to learn from your mistakes—you must actively pursue training and educational opportunities that provide real-world situations and responses.

Emergencies can happen anywhere. Wherever humans go, medical emergencies will follow, regardless of time of day, year, or location. It would be nice if every EMS call occurred indoors, under well lit and environmentally stable conditions. But that's usually not the case. In fact, some medical emergencies are the result of the patient being exposed to extreme weather, which affects not only the patient, but also the rescuers and their equipment. And in the case of vital tools like your portable suction unit, they, like you, had better be up to the task.

Anyone in the medical field can attest to the importance of suction. How else could we clear a patient’s airway were it not for the use of suction? When you think of all the arenas in which suction is used—throughout hospitals, in the prehospital setting, and just about any place treatment is provided—it’s impossible to imagine patient care without it.

When we think of critical suction scenarios, we tend to envision our most serious patients: the elderly cardiac who arrested at a local restaurant, having just finished a hearty meal; the multisystem trauma patient involved in a high-speed, head-on collision; or the unresponsive overdose who collapsed outside the nightclub. These are the patients who stand out in our minds when we reflect on critical suction scenarios.

If you’re a seasoned EMS professional, it’s intriguing to look back over your career and compare your current perspective to how you felt when you first entered the field. Think back to when you were a rookie paramedic or a green EMT. Sure, school prepared you for the responsibilities you would face in the field, but nothing compares to the experience you gain by running calls on real patients.

In an airway emergency, every second counts. Imagine if you were the one suffering from airway compromise. You’d want your responders to not only react immediately to your situation, but to employ precision when clearing your airway.