NEMSMA and Best Practices in Emergency Services release results of survey of 450 EMS and fire managers, many of whom report that budget cuts are impacting their response times and staffing.

NEMSMA hosted a national conference call in December as part of President Obama's effort to engage the American community about health care reform. Based on that call, NEMSMA made 11 recommendations to President Obama and HHS Secretary-Designate Daschle about how to improve and support EMS. Click the link below to read NEMSMA's recommendations.

Skip Kirkwood, Aarron Reinert and Lanny Bernard were elected by the membership of the National EMS Management Association to serve on the NEMSMA Board for 2009. They will join President Gary Wingrove, Treasurer Bill Dunwoody, Secretary Troy Hagen, Immediate Past President Darryl Coontz and members-at-large Ray Barishansky, Larry Roberts and Forrest Wood. Kirkwood also was named by the Board as President-Elect. 2009 will be the first year that NEMSMA will be governed by a 10-member Board, as a result of a change in the by-laws approved by members in 2008.

NEMSMA has joined the American Ambulance Association in its objection to defining EMS agencies as “creditors” under the Fair and Accurate Credit Transaction Act of 2003. If EMS agencies were considered “creditors,” as the Federal Trade Commission has recommended, then they would be required to develop and implement written identity theft prevention programs to the identify, detect and respond to patterns, practices, or other specified activities—referred to as “red flags”—which could indicate identify theft. Click the link below to read NEMSMA’s letter to the FTC on this topic.

The National EMS Management Association (NEMSMA) released a white paper at EMS EXPO in October that calls on the EMS industry to make significant improvements in they way in which it defines, educates, trains and credentials those individuals responsible for the management of EMS agencies.

The white paper, titled “Emergency Medical Services Management and Leadership Development in America: An Agenda for the Future,” calls for all national groups representing EMS to come together to agree on standardized nomenclature to define the various levels of EMS management and assign competencies to each of those levels. This effort would be called the National EMS Officers Levels and Competencies Project.

NEMSMA also calls for the creation of the National EMS Officers Training and Education Project to develop model course offerings and model curricula for EMS management that would guide training programs and academic institutions in supporting consensus-identified competencies. Part of that project also would bring together all the major training programs and educational institutions engaged in EMS officer development to engage in future development of EMS management curricula and create a vision and plan for a national EMS officer development and resource center.

Finally, NEMSMA seeks the creation of a national organization to award credentials to EMS managers who are able to demonstrate the competencies defined by the National EMS Officers Levels and Competencies Project.

The proposed ASTM Practice Standard on Radiological Emergency Response mandates that all emergency medical services responders plan, be trained, and maintain properly equipped deployable response resources for radiological emergencies. This means that EMS organizations must have access previously unavailable federal, state, and local funding to support the equipment and training needs addressed in this standard. Therefore,  NEMSMA supports and endorses the proposed standard and further urges the ASTM Committee on Homeland Security Applications, Subcommittee on Emergency Preparedness, Training, and Procedures (E54.02) to support enhanced funding for emergency medical services organizations, regardless of the status of that organization (governmental or non-governmental) such that the letter and the intent of the proposed standard can be achieved in every community in the United States

NEMSMA has moved its listserv to Google groups. This discussion group is open to NEMSMA members. Recent topics include shift scheduling, management books and billing benchmarks. Click the link below to sign up today.