"Not passing judgment" - really?

krizon

krizon

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I've just seen a trailer on Ch.4 for "Party Paramedics", which promises to show paras dealing with falling-down, puking, gobby binge drinkers. It ends with one of the paras saying, "We don't pass judgment."

There's been a lot made of not passing judgment/not being judgmental in the past several years, as if it's innately a good thing. But of course we pass - or make - judgments all the time. Who to marry, who to swerve at parties, what car to drive, what type of behaviour is acceptable or not to us, what kind of dog we like, on and on.

So I just don't buy this. Here are people mostly old enough to know how much drink sends them doolally. That they then can't function further without emergency medical intervention makes me pass a judgment all right. Waste of resources, self-destructive, and antisocial, for starters.

So - is 'we don't make judgments' just a cop-out, a code for 'we don't want to get involved'', and why isn't it acceptable for paras to make judgments about behaviour, when the police make judgments all the time - there's no 'we don't make judgments' about drunk and disorderlies and other dumb actions due to being rat-arsed.
 
Agreed. Channel 4 relies on these cretins (the drunks, not the paramedics) for half their programmes, so they don't like to pass judgements.

Next up is a family of permanently rat arsed benefit claimants doing up a property that they're squatting in and having a bake off against a similar family from a different estate.

Like the use of 'cop out' by the way!
 
Why would they pass judgment? What would it achieve? They still have to treat them, still have to provide them the best possible care in the circumstances. Its probably much easier to do their job if they don't feel the need to moralise about every incident they're sent to.

And given what the average paramedic sees and does week in, week out (not just drunks), they can "cop out" on this all they like in my book.
 
Interesting use of 'moralising' in connection to 'judgmental', Gareth. Perhaps the woman in the trailer should've said: "We don't moralise about them", rather than "we don't pass judgment", as there is a clear difference.
 
Here's an example: your doctor tells you you're clinically obese and that if you don't lose weight, you've got a good chance of having a heart attack and being dead by 40. No personal morality involved in that, is there? But he has made a judgment on your condition and has offered his advice - lose the blubber, or die. Therefore, I don't see any problem with the paras making a similar judgment of the puking pissheads.

I agree, of course, that there's sometimes a point where one's moral settings collide with a factual judgment, in a case like saying a jockey, known to enjoy the use of cocaine, rode atrociously "probably because of his habit", or rode beautifully, "in spite of his habit", where the judgment passed on the ride collides with what one believes are the norms of conventional behaviour. But unless his coke habit was known to have affected his rides in the past, moralising about his habit would be irrelevant and unjustified. And, one might say, unless his coke habit caused his behaviour to be something unacceptable, it would be of itself not unethical, and therefore not to be moralised about. Just as being drunk is not unethical in itself.
 
I've no doubt that they pass clinical judgment all the time, as the doctor in your example has, but I'd be surprised if the paramedic in the trailer meant that.
 
I think it's about time they were passing judgement - why should costly and, crucially, finite resources be wasted on what Kri has rightly called puking pissheads?

Some entirely blameless individual could die, and probably has, as a result of the appropriate crew being elsewhere tending to the socially irresponsible.
 
krizon said:
the police make judgments all the time
Click to expand...

No they don't - they use their judgement to decide if a case warrants an arrest. A subsequent court of some description makes a judgement.

And paramedics are far better off keeping any personal "judgements" that they may make to themselves. Far safer.
 
There seem to be several paramedic diarys & blogs out there on the www, an interesting way to put their point across.
 
Really, Steve? I suppose that surprises me a wee bit - it's as if cops and firemen blogged their activities, things we tend to think aren't revealed, a bit like soldiers' experiences. Maybe this is the new reality of instant and usually anonymous communication? It's a bit like part-confession, part self-counselling, and perhaps cathartic for some?
 
This one might've been up before but there's a couple of books out by the author of this blog so I guess there's a market out there for it, I think there's a policeman who's done something similar too.
 
Steve T said:
This one might've been up before but there's a couple of books out by the author of this blog so I guess there's a market out there for it, I think there's a policeman who's done something similar too.
Click to expand...

That was Nightjack, a serving copper whose blog won a national prize. It was a tremendous read, but was taken down when he was outed by a scum journalist called Foster. This story is doing the rounds again at the moment, linked to the Levenson inquiry.
 
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