The EMS Today 2016 conference program presents an expansive and diverse offering of more than 140 sessions that will allow you to choose from the best and most cutting-edge EMS educational courses in North America.
In a special effort to address and combat provider stress, as well as the increasing rise in suicide among emergency responders, we are offering key sessions by industry experts:
>> Coping with the Stress of EMS & Suicide Prevention in EMS, presented by Jeffrey Mitchell, Clinical Professor of Emergency Health Services at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and co-founder and senior faculty of the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation.
>> What’s Killing Our Medics? Focusing on the shocking results found by a team of EMS researchers after a 2015 survey of 4,021 emergency responders. The results of the survey showed alarmingly high levels of stress, suicide contemplation and suicide attempts among survey respondents. The survey also revealed that work cultures that didn’t support employees through critical stress had higher rates of suicide contemplation and attempts. While some respondents found formal support institutions to be effective, the results–which will be presented in full during this session–show that there is still much room for improvement in our detection and care of our responders.
This information is so important that we are offering this session twice during EMS Today 2016. Someone from your service, particularly your human resource manager, needs to attend one of these eye-opening sessions.
Additional EMS Today 2016 sessions covering stress and the emotional aspect of EMS work include:
· Decision Fatigue: Too Tired to Think Straight
· Mental Health of EMS Providers: The Ottawa Model
· Strategies for Staying on Your Emotional Track
· Ethical Dilemmas in EMS
· Getting over the Emotional Hurdle of Bad Calls
· Drinking Alcohol? Just Say KNOW!
· First Responder Stress Resiliency: How to Reduce Stress That Can Lead to Provider Suicide
To help advance our profession, we have added a special EMS Compass Town Hall Meeting that will bring the brightest minds working on this federal initiative to EMS Today in a day-long forum to discuss how carefully crafted performance measures could transform EMS, increase our validity as an impactful profession, and not only improve our position in the house of medicine but also increase the financial reimbursement and support we receive.
In addition, we are offering a full-day, information-packed Community Paramedicine Workshop as well as other key planning and implementation sessions on Mobile Integrated Health in a special MIH track. The Wednesday, Feb. 24 CP Workshop will present key information learned from a group of MIH-CP agencies and providers currently operational and serving patients in their communities.
EMS Today 2016 also offers the opportunity to receive credit toward the National EMS Management Association EMS Supervising Officer certification. A majority of this year’s Leadership sessions, and many of the Community Paramedic and Special Topic sessions, are eligible for NEMSMA credentialing. Look for the NEMSMA icon in the conference program to identify sessions that meet the requirement.
Members of the Major Metropolitan EMS Medical Directors Consortium (“Eagles”), representing most of the largest population centers in the U.S. and other countries, will be at EMS Today 2016 presenting lectures on new trends and controversies in prehospital medicine, as well as the ever-popular two-hour Eagles Lightening Round Super Session on Friday, Feb. 26 beginning at 8:00 am.
Leadership
EMS Today 2016 features a complete educational track on leadership to satisfy the needs of EMS managers and administrators as they steer their agencies through demanding times. Of specific interest are the sessions detailed below.
>> EMS Compass Town Hall Meeting: How Performance Measures Could Transform EMS
The EMS Compass initiative, a national effort by EMS providers that will not only be designing performance measures for the present but creating a process for the continual design, testing and evaluation of future EMS performance measures, as well as guidance for how local systems can use those measures to improve, will be the focus of this important pre-conference Town Hall Meeting at EMS Today 2016. See the complete details in our conference brochure. You will want a representative from your service to be in attendance to learn about this game-changing federal, multi-organization consensus initiative.
>> Boosting Recruitment, Retention & Reputation (two sessions)
These four-hour pre-conference workshops will show you how to recruit, retain and strengthen your organization’s competitive advantage through use of “DISC” personality assessments, employee pairing and key organizational processes.
>> The New Enhanced Role of the Public in EMS Response
This session will show you how Jersey City Medical Center adopted and implemented a successful program, first implemented in Israel, which involves trained community members and EMS service staff in an enhanced EMS response plan designed to get emergency care to patients in a congested urban environment in three minutes or less.
Additional recommended leadership sessions that will be eligible for NEMSMA EMS Officer Credentialing include:
- Conducting Incident Investigations: Will Your Agency Win in Court?
- Risk Management for EMS
- Creating Clinical Leaders and Mentors
- Designing the Ambulance of the Future
- Practicing Proactive Professionalism
- Data Dichotomy in the New EMS Payer Landscape
- Thinking outside the Box: Implementing Best Practices from Other Industries
- Customer Service When the Patient is Not the Customer
- Change Management in Emergency Services: Leading the Charge for Change
- How to Prevent Your EMS System from Failing: 2016 Update
- Using Data and Technology to Improve Operations and Clinical Care
- Using Data to Increase Performance in Volunteer Rescue & EMS Agencies
- Precepting: Is It a Privilege or a Right?
- A Systematic Method of Improving Performance of People
- Keeping Your Organization (Favorably) in the Public Eye
- Creating a Social EMS Culture: A Balanced Approach to Social Media
- Improving Quality and Safety While Reducing Legal Risk
- Implementing an EMS Culture of Safety: Near-Miss Analysis
- Artificial Intelligence: Bridging Human Decision Making and Technology in EMS
- Conflict Resolution in EMS
- Health Information Exchange: A No-Brainer Concept That Keeps Generating Seizures
- Do Your Employment Practices Scream Out, “Hey, Sue Me!”
- Emergent Response: A Dangerous Epidemic in EMS
- Dealing With Requests for Patient Information from Law Enforcement, Attorneys, Family Members and Others
- The Profession of EMS: The Fundamental Next Step
Also of interest to our EMS Insider readers will be the educational track on Community Paramedicine. Covered topics will include:
- Payment Strategies & Innovations
- Accredited Point of Care Testing: Why Should I Care?
- The Future of Paramedicine in Our Hands through Self-Regulation?
- Case Studies in Hospice Care: What Has Happened When the Squad Shows up in the Home of a Hospice Patient
- Making the Business Case for MIH-CP: What You Need to Know for Discussions with Your Healthcare Partners
- Creating Community Capital: Developing Non-traditional Partnerships in EMS
Don’t miss special one-on-one roundtable CP discussions, in which you can pick four of the presented topics to participate:
- Funding models
- Making the business case for hospitals, third-party payers, hospice agencies and home health
- How you can work together with other EMS agencies to create regional solutions for potential payers
- Partnerships for regional solutions
- Provider selection and training
- Continuing education (What’s being done to keep MIH/CP staff current and expand their skills/services)
- National credentialing models (What’s being uses and what’s working)
- “A day in the life” of a community paramedic
Dynamic & Active Threats
Recent events such as the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino have brought heightened attention to the need for EMS responders to prepare for such a scenario. That is why EMS Today 2016 offers a full conference track on Dynamic & Active Threats. Highlights include:
>> Self Defense Tactics for EMS Providers
In these two four-hour workshops, the Maryland State Police will teach you how to identify potential threats to your own safety and the safety of your patients, plus self-defense techniques you can use if you find yourself in dangerous situations to protect yourself and get away from the threat.
>> Dynamic & Active Threats Panel
This two-hour super session will feature an expert panel on dynamic and active threats who will identify incidents EMS, fire and police responders are responding to and may be called on to manage in the future.
The panelists are:
- William Fabbri, MD, Director of Operational Medicine, Federal Bureau of Investigation
- Douglas Mohl, FBI Special Agent and Coordinator of the FBI’s Operational Medicine (OpMed) Program for the Washington Field Office
- Terry Nichols, Director of Curriculum Development, Texas State University–Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT)–and co-author of “Active Shooter Events and Response”, CRC Press, June 2013
- Geoffrey Shapiro, Director, EMS & Operational Medical Training, Emergency Health Services program, George Washington University
- E. Reed Smith, MD, Operational Medical Director, Arlington County (VA) Fire Department, operational medical director of the Arlington, attending physician at Virginia Hospital Center, and associate professor of emergency medicine at the George Washington University
>> When Responders Become Victims
This session will examine specific incidents and true practices surrounding scene safety, as well address the physical and emotional response of EMS providers. Jersey City EMS’s purchase of innovative, discrete, ballistic vests to match their daily uniforms will be presented as a potentially critical strategy.
Other key sessions in the Dynamic & Active Threats track include:
- Active Shooter Preparedness: How to Integrate Police, Fire and EMS Responses
- Emergency Medical Response to the Active Shooter
- Lessons Learned from Washington Navy Yard Active Shooter Incident
- Chemical Suicides: A New Threat to Emergency Responders
- Excited Delirium Syndrome and Law Enforcement Toxicology
- ICS for Rescue Task Force Operations in Warm Zones: Applying the Joint Rescue Task Force Model
- Legal Issues with Body Cameras and Other New Imaging Devices in EMS
- Pediatric Issues When Unconventional Weapons Are Involved
- Emerging Trends and EMS Implications from the Joint Counter Terrorism Awareness Workshop Series (JCTAWS)
- How to Select Providers for Tactical EMS
- The Whole Community Plan for a Biologic Disaster
- Creating Active Bystanders
- Preparing for “Mini” Mass Casualty Events
We hope to see you at these critically important leadership sessions at EMS Today 2016. See you in Baltimore!
