Here in America, EMS personnel generally wear tall, reinforced boots; they are considered protective/safety equipment. We would never take them off just to enter a home
Here in America, EMS personnel generally wear tall, reinforced boots; they are considered protective/safety equipment. We would never take them off just to enter a home
As firefighters we enter homes in our full turnout gear with fire boots, even for simple calls like automatic fire alarms. The reason being 1/100 automatic alarms are real fires, so we don't want to be caught with our pants down.
Throughout my fire and EMS training I was taught to anticipate possible violence from the residents. I personally know folks who have entered buildings and been shot at or found booby traps. One guy I know responded to an arson house fire where the resident had cut out holes in the floor under every window and door and covered the holes with rugs, Home Alone style.
The US has a serious drug and mental health crisis. First responders often have to deal with people who probably would be in state care if we didn't spend all our tax money on bombs and tax cuts for the wealthy. Or at least they would have caretakers who visit and help them take medications and escalate when they start setting up booby traps to defend against the voices.
It also seems quite dangerous to take them off- depending on the home. Some hoarders, drug addicted situations have needles, glass shards and razor blades in the debris on the floor. How do they handle hoarders in japan?
Obviously, it depends on the context once the front door opens to you
But - the context changes from room to room? Clean shared flat- messy druggy room with collapsed overdose person in it? This.. this whole situation makes no sense.. Have helper boots with a "condom-wrapper" if you are afraid of cleanliness - but keep the boots on at all times.
Probably the same in most Western countries. It's self reinforcing though; if you were expecting to take them off you'd never pick those shoes by default, rather leave them in the back of the car (which presumably/hopefully is what they do in Japan, in case they *do* need them? idk…)
if you do need them you're not going to have time to go get them as an Emergency Responder. I think the pragmatic course then is to disregard etiquette and tradition for safety and practicality in a general sense.
Everyone except the driver has ample time to swap boots during the drive to the location. (In cases where not, I'd also default to robust safety boots.)
Depending on the boots, you might not want to wear them while "idle"¹ in any case, though that's mostly a non-concern with modern safety shoes.
¹ mandatory note: most emergency responders have tons of work while "idle", I just mean "not actively responding"
You don't always know what the location is like though. You are called to an apartment: maybe it is spotlessly clean, maybe the floor is littered with used needles
A friend of mine who was a paramedic told me that getting people out of a building is actually heavy, dangerous work. "They always die on the crapper, up 3 flights of stairs."
Also, in my town, the firefighters are also paramedics. The first people who showed up in my Moment of Need came in a fire truck. The ambulance came a couple minutes later.
For particularly heavy patients, on occasion the only way is to knock down a wall.
I think I've mentioned it before here but at a hospital near me a few years ago they got a bariatric patient in who was so large they couldn't weigh her. I suggested that since they were near a VOSA inspection site they could have just had the whole ambulance on the weighbridge, but apparently when someone is around 350kg you kind of don't need that degree of accuracy.
The hospital facilities team removed the front doors and the unboltable parts of the frame, and then gassed off the handrails and wheelchair ramp fittings to give access.
The ambulance arrived followed by a fire brigade Landrover with four guys in and a rescue pump with another five. It took all of them to lift the patient into the hospital on a canvas sling.
That would be very unlikely in Japan, maybe it would happen a handful of times in your career and you could indeed put on safer boots.
Anyway I’m not against paramedics wearing boots in my apartment, in an emergency very few people would care about that even in Japan.
How certain are you that it is so rare? EMS are disproportionately called to the poorest and most miserable.