A while back a list member asked about how legal rules about time would affect the year shown on a person's birth certificate for a person born near midnight December 31 / January 1. As a volunteer emergency medical technician, I have been trained in field childbirth. The EMS state protocol gives no specific instructions about recording time of birth. An approved textbook by Mistovich & Karen, "Prehospital Emergency Care" 9th ed. instructs EMTs to care for mother and baby through the delivery of the placenta (10-20 minutes after birth of the child) and then "Record the time of delivery and transport mother, infant, and placenta to the hospital." So if the instructions are carried out literally, it requires the EMT to mentally estimate a time of about 10 to 20 minutes.
My interest in time and names have lead me to come across some other time-of-birth scenarios: A child is born in a conveyance (ambulance, aircraft, ship, etc.) while it is outside the US, but the child is first removed from the conveyance in the US. The child's birth certificate is filed in the locality where the child is removed from the conveyance, but the child's place of birth is the best estimate of where the conveyance was at the time of birth. The time of birth would be the actual time of birth, but the time zone (and hence date) would be that of the location of the conveyance at the time of birth, or the time zone where the child is removed from the conveyance. A child is born in a conveyance, and the conveyance is inside the US at all times. The place of birth is where the child is removed from the conveyance. Typically, this wood be a child born in an ambulance and the child would be removed at the hospital. The same issue of which time described in the first scenario applies. A child is born in the field outside of any conveyance. The time and place of birth are the actual time and place of birth. A child is born in a basic life support (BLS) ambulance, which meets an advance life support (ALS) ambulance on some dark foggy highway. The place of birth is the place where the child is transferred from the BLS to the ALS ambulance, because that is where the child is first removed from a conveyance. All of this may very well be recorded in computerized patient care reports; ambulances are beginning to carry laptops for this purpose. What are the chances the software designers considered all these scenarios? Gerard Ashton PS: (I'm fudging the minutes due to imperfect memory) Dispatched on an ambulance call at 2:30 AM. Returned to quarters 2:15 AM. _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list [email protected] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
