The matter of fact

This month a great swathe of the paramedic community will be mourning the loss of one of it paragons, Roland Furber. By all accounts and testimony seen by this author, Roland was instrumental in the founding and forging of the paramedic profession, an extremely altruistic man and a stalwart believer in principled hard work. For the JPP this last month has seen the loss of perhaps its most eminent board member and for the College of Paramedics, it's President and one of its ‘founding fathers’ and for paramedics, a veritable patron of their profession.

The issue of mortality is a difficult concept for anyone to grasp and perhaps impossible for us to truly come to terms with. Unfortunately for those in the profession, paramedics are expected to experience and endure this morbid certainty on a regular basis, witnessing the end of life in immediate and unadulterated poignancy, often involving individuals who have been killed by blameless accident and unhappy chance. As a consequence, many in the profession are perpetually reminded that they too are subject to this fragility and to the plethora of means by which they could have their lives taken away, all the while being expected to remain unwaveringly focussed on treating the patient at hand. As paramedics, you are no more or less aware of the fact of death than any other professional. After all, everyone knows they are going to die even if they haven't fully come to terms with the fact—however, as a member of the emergency services the inevitability of death is impressed on you with far greater regularity than almost any other profession, and the psychological repercussions from witnessing both the fragility of the human form and the seemingly utter randomness of accidental death is a weighty truth to carry as part of your working day. It is certainly a key difficulty to overcome for members of the profession, and one which is arguably neglected and kept ‘out of mind’ as much as possible during pre-hospital practice, an issue explored by Brady (2013) further in this issue.