As you all know, I got started in EMS at a very young age. The area of New Jersey that I grew up in is rich with a long, distinguished history of Volunteer EMS and Fire personnel. I remember being in my EMT class at the age of 16. It was taught in a large auditorium filled with about 75 people. Every Tuesday and Thursday night, we’d sit there enjoying lectures, or break up into groups and run skills stations, with the ultimate goal of adding all of us to the long, distiguished list of graduates of Community Medical Center’s EMT program. That was where I met a man by the name of “Big John” Glowacki. He was a man whose reputation as a gruff, hard nosed, demanding yet professional person preceded him. John was an EMT Instructor, one of our dispatchers, and Life Member and Captain of the East Dover Volunteer First Aid Squad. It was impressive that had accomplished all of this by the age of 30. When I turned 18, John approached me and asked me if I would be interested in riding with him on his Tuesday Day Duty Crew on his squad. I wasn’t a member, but a lot of us who rode days down in Dover Twp (now known as Toms River) worked together to do what we could to get as many trucks on the road as possible. At some point during my career down there, I rode on a rig from five of the six Township departments. For the next three summers, and starting in the afternoons when I was in high school, I would come home, call John, and let him know I was in service. During that time, I learned a lot from him, not only from a patient care stand point, but also from an attitude and professionalism stand point. John wasn’t as mean as some people made him out to be. Sure, he was demanding and authoritative sometimes, but there are few people who I have encountered in my career who were more dedicated to the field. I never saw John lose his cool on a call. He was always so calm,...

As you remember from my last post, recently, I have seen an increased interest in a lot of the blog posts and articles that I’ve been sharing with some of my coworkers. Now, here I was on a Sunday evening with our Training Coordinator sitting in front of my computer. I went straight to http://www.levelzeromovie.com Ever since Ted Setla released his documentary about Alameda County EMS, I’ve been trying to find some way to work it into sharing it with as many employees as I could. He paints the providers in the movie as true professionals who love their jobs. Their messages and words of wisdom are so powerful and should be heard and understood by anyone who is trying to get into this field. After showing him the Level Zero trailer, I told Dave that I thought that this would be a great way to spend 20 minutes of our New Employee Academy. He liked what he saw, and liked what he had heard, and told me that if I could get him access to it and permission from Ted to use it, he’d be happy to include it. Well, 20 minutes later, after a brief conversation with Ted, I had everything lined up and ready to go for the premier of Level Zero at my company. Monday morning, I was still handing out a few copies of Steve Whitehead’s Blog Posts. People were reading them and saying, “Wow, yeah, that makes sense.” Or “that’s the exact problem that we’re having here!” Eyes were starting to open. At 9am, I walked into our daily management meeting, laptop in hand. After we had gone through the regular business, I looked at a few other members of the management team. “Can I borrow you guys for 20 minutes?” Three of them agreed to stick around, and I fired up my Netbook, and started streaming Level Zero for them. To say that the reactions that I got from them were positive would be an understatement. Not only were they impressed with the quality of the production, but they loved the message behind it all. They loved how the providers were portrayed not only as EMTs and...

Earlier this year, Steve Whitehead and Natalie Quebuedeaux coined the phrase “Make your own Thunder.” It has quickly become one of my favorite phrases. Here’s my story, broken down into two parts, about the rumbles that I’ve created over the last week. . . For the last couple of years, I’ve been a member of the National EMS Management Association (NEMSMA) List Serv through Google. It’s a hotbed of conversation and information about the industry, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in furthering their career in EMS. Quite often, I would find posts or articles that seemed very relevant to the issues faced within my company, so I would copy and paste like mad to some of my colleagues, hoping that it would have some impact. This practice increased ten fold this past February when I became involved in the Social Media movement in EMS. As I have read more blogs, I’ve grown more and more excited about the information that had been right under my nose. Who would have thought that there were so many people out there with the same ideas and motivations that I had? Quite often, I would send the copied and pasted articles and links out, and I wouldn’t really hear back from anyone. I knew a few people read them, but I never really got much feedback about what they were reading. In the last week, that changed. It all started last Wednesday when I got an email from one of my main “targets” of all of my forwards, our Operations Manager. It asked a simple question: “Can you send me the links to what you read and listen to?” I was really excited, and I got right to work. I started going through my bookmarks, sharing every podcast, blog, and publication that I frequent. While he is a very open minded guy, and thinks along the same track that I do, here was my chance to really open up his eyes to what was out there. By Friday, I had already received a number of links from him pointing out articles and posts that he really liked. By Sunday, he had sent out an email...

Last night was a big night for me. It started out with the opportunity to participate in a great Podcast hosted by one Kyle David Bates called The First Few Moments. If you haven’t checked it out yet, please do so. It’s got some great information about dealing with issues such as triage, treatment, and management of the critical first minutes of a scene. That was followed by the 100th episode of EMS Garage. Not only was I able to listen to the show, but I was actually on it too. Like I told Chris Montera, the show’s host, “Being on the Garage for me was like being a fan that is plucked out of the crowd and put on the court.” It was a great experience, and I am extremely grateful. I finished the night catching up with Ms. Paramedic and Jeramedic over Skype. If you haven’t heard of them, check them out on their many projects: The Gen Med Show, Mutual Aid, and their personal blogs to name a few. I had a great discussion with Jeramedic about some of the recent events here in Massachusetts. As many of you know, my wonderful Commonwealth has been in the news quite a bit over the last few months, first for the more than 200 EMTs who have had their certifications suspended, and more recently, the law that was signed in by Governor Deval Patrick making the minimum staffing for an ALS Ambulance one Paramedic and one EMT. Previously, it was two Paramedics, and if a service wanted to run with anything less, they would have to obtain a waiver from their Region. The President of the Professional Fire Fighters of Massachusetts has expressed his concerns for this proposed minimal staffing change by saying that “People are going to die because of this law.” In my opinion, that assessment of the new law is a touch dramatic. There are many, many systems across the country of a variety of sizes that staff with a “one and one” standard. So the question was raised: “Is more less?” Does the presence of more Paramedics mean the deterioration of one single Paramedic’s skills? I was excited to...