Like many students, Tufts Emergency Medical Services (TEMS) volunteers spend Saturday nights clinging to their phones.
But what sets TEMS students apart is that on some weekends, the phone does not stop ringing until 7 a.m.
Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, there are TEMS students in uniform - khaki pants and a navy polo with the Star of Life emblem - prepared to respond to a gamut of medical needs, from broken bones and twisted ankles to alcohol poisoning and other life-threatening emergencies.
Unlike other volunteer ambulance service members, these certified Emergency Medical Technicians (EMT) go about their daily routines while they are on the job. When a call comes in, everything else must be put on hold.
Whether it is in the middle of a class or while hanging out with friends, on duty TEMS volunteers have to leave whatever they are doing and respond to the scene immediately.
"There is a lot that goes through your mind from the start of the call to the end of it," Executive Director of TEMS Robert Kaufman, a senior, said. "There are also a lot of quick judgments we need to make, like do we need an ambulance? How do we get the patient out of the building?"
Regardless of the call, Tufts University Police Department (TUPD) dispatches an officer to meet TEMS at the scene. Police are there for protection - it is a felony to assault a TEMS volunteer, as with any EMT - and to provide access to areas where TEMS' key fob does not work, like dorm rooms, Kaufman said.
While the two groups work together, anything a student tells a TEMS volunteer is kept private, even from TUPD, because of medical confidentiality laws, Geoffrey Bartlett, Tufts' Director of Emergency Management, said.
"TEMS' purpose there is only to help you medically and provide you with the medical care you need," senior Laurie Merker said. "We want to make it very clear that we are not involved in the disciplinary part of that."
Most TEMS calls do not require disciplinary action, though. Of the 486 calls TEMS received last school year, alcohol-related calls composed just about a quarter - the largest proportion of a specific kind of call, but not the majority. Other kinds of calls included those for abdominal pain, fainting and difficulty breathing, Kaufman said.
"I think it is important for people, from someone who turned their ankle on a step to occasionally a serious emergency, to understand that TEMS is there for them," Bartlett said. "A lot of the value for TEMS comes from the calls that they respond to that maybe are not emergencies."
TEMS volunteers cannot discuss the specifics of calls with each other beyond discussions about medical care, Kaufman said. Outside of those at the scene, the only person fully informed about what happens at each call is TEMS Medical Director Stacey Sperling, a Health Services Physician who receives the reports that TEMS volunteers file after each call.
"There is a very high probability that we will know the patient, know the patient's friends," Kaufman said. "It adds an extra level of necessary privacy that we need to be extra careful about."
To keep an eye on the campus' emergency medical care, Sperling goes through each report - such reports are called "run sheets" - with the corresponding TEMS volunteers. She also gives a monthly lecture, on a topic of TEMS students' choice, further benefiting the quality of TEMS' emergency medical care.
"The students have a very good understanding of what is going on when they come onto the scene," Sperling said. "These kids are so dedicated, so smart, so earnest and interested in giving really good emergency service to the campus."
As a TEMS volunteer, students attend four training sessions, each two to three hours, per semester. New members get additional practice at office hours with senior members of TEMS.
"No one comes out of the EMT class and gets handed the keys to the truck," Kaufman said. "That is a big responsibility so that is something we work on a lot."
New volunteers must have practice taking calls with experienced members before they are promoted, which helps them gain knowledge of TEMS-specific policy and the confidence to care for patients with the correct treatment. At the moment, though, there are a disproportionate number of new to old members, as many students join TEMS later in their Tufts careers, Kaufman said.
"Part of the issue is joining a student EMS service is not the first thing that comes to mind when students get here," Kaufman said. "Those of us who got in early, got trained early, and now we have to train a lot of newer people."
TEMS began 27 years ago as a Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate-funded group. Two EMT-certified students approached TUPD in 1985 about creating an organization for student first-responders on campus, according to Kaufman.
Although it started small and was not around-the-clock care, TEMS formed a close relationship with Health Service's then medical director to establish its position on campus, Bartlett said.
Not until a tumultuous, but successful, battle to include TEMS' cost in the Student Activities Fee did the Department of Environmental and Public Safety assume managerial responsibility for TEMS, as it still does today, according to Bartlett.
Shortly thereafter, in 1991, TEMS received its first vehicle, a Ford Explorer, Bartlett said. To date, TEMS continues to operate just one car on campus, which they use to transport patients to the hospital for minor injuries and illnesses. For more serious calls a patient is taken away by a local ambulance service, Sperling said.
Though a student-run EMS is not unique to Tufts, the peer-to-peer medical care and TEMS students' campus awareness contribute to the quality of service TEMS provides, a standard the service is required to uphold as a member of the National Collegiate EMS Foundation.
"I think patients have a degree of comfort in knowing that it is a peer providing care," Bartlett said. "Local providers will have the same quality care, but these [students] understand the needs of the community."
