Peter Plahmer, RN, BSN, who has spent several decades responding to emergencies – first as a police officer in Wisconsin and then as a nurse—now spends much of his time in the communities around his Arizona home trying to keep people out of the ED in the first place.
As Banner University Medical Center’s trauma outreach and injury prevention coordinator, he promotes campaigns that are relevant to EDs in his area, from teaching about gun violence to dehydration.
Plahmer is working to establish a violence interrupter program which will connect volunteers who have been shot or who were in gangs to talk victims in the ED to reduce recidivism.
The interrupters will be able to “get in there right away and talk them off the ledge to prevent retaliation,” Plahmer said.
Some of the education campaigns Plahmer promotes are universal. He runs Stop the Bleed training in a variety of locations: from churches to municipalities to a county department of public works. He also teaches people how to prevent dehydration and wilderness-related injuries, particularly in the winter, when so many out-of-towners arrive in Arizona to escape the cold.
“There are hikers who get into serious trouble,” he said. “They’ll come out here and take an 8-ounce bottle of water, and it’s 110 degrees out. They just don’t know what to do.”
His trauma outreach team participates in the El Tour de Tucson, one of the country’s largest cycling events, to emphasize safety and promote the Tucson Loop, which is a motor-free bicycle trail in the area.
Emergency nurses and police officers aren’t easily shocked, but one thing does surprise him, he said: the number of people injured in car crashes who weren’t wearing seatbelts. He said a nearby stretch of interstate is particularly notorious for motor vehicle accidents.
“It’s 75 mph, so people are going 95, 90,” Plahmer said. Making it even worse, he said, is that children are involved. “It never ceases to amaze me. You can educate people till you’re blue in the face.”
He won’t stop trying, though. This fall, his team worked with Banner’s child life professionals to run a teddy bear clinic at Reid Park Zoo for up to 1,000 children to explore the zoo and learn about animals’ health, as well as their own. Representatives from his trauma team talked about bicycle safety and seatbelts.
Plahmer’s first exposure to emergency care was as a new police officer in Sheboygan, because at that time rookie cops were required to complete EMT training. It did not appeal to him then.
“I took no joy from that. I didn’t want to be on an ambulance. I hated going on medical calls,” Plahmer said. If someone told that rookie cop then that he would one day excel as a nurse, “I would have said ‘you’re crazy.’”
But when he moved with his then-wife to Arizona in 2003, he used the change to try a new career as an ED tech. He later returned to Wisconsin, earned his ADN in 2008, and worked in a Milwaukee hospital before taking a travel assignment and returning to Arizona. He has also worked as a flight nurse, and at the age of 59, earned his BSN.
Plahmer said nursing appeals to his self-described type A personality in ways police work did.
“You’re working in a team. You make quick decisions. There are high levels of stress,” he said. “There are a lot of parallels.”