differently from men in EMS is when transporting a female psychiatric patient. Inevitably, every single time there is a female psychiatric patient that needs to be transported from her house to a facility, or from one facility to another, a female is sent to do the call. This is a practice that is vastly unfair for a variety of reasons. The first is that if a female is sent to do a psychiatric call, she is not available to do an emergency call, should one come in. The second is that a large percent of the time, when a facility calls to request a team to do a female psychiatric transfer, they do not mandate that one of the team members be a female. It is an incorrect assumption that is made by whomever is dispatching the call. In my personal experience, both male and female dispatchers have done this. The counter argument made by men is that if there is an all-male crew doing a female psychiatric transport, she can claim that they made sexual advances toward her. That initially sounds like a valid claim, but who is to say that in these transports the female crewmember is the one who sits in the back of the truck with the patient. I know that when I get these calls I would rather drive. There is no rule that defines the roles of the male and the female in doing these transports, so some of the time a male crewmember is the one accompanying the patient, while other times it is the female crewmember.The implication of the previous paragraph is that there is a male crewmember and a female crewmember. That is not always true. Sometimes there are two male crewmembers, but there are never two female crewmembers. Some companies may have a policy allowing two females to ride together, but most do not, including the company I work for. The administration that makes the rules has established that it is not safe for two females to work together for a variety of reasons. One is that they feel that two females working together cannot de...
