By Drew Johnson
EMS1 Editor
Six years ago, social media was just a blip on most people’s radar. Twelve years ago, most of us were just signing up for our first email account. Twenty years ago, only a fraction of U.S. citizens had an Internet connection at home.
Oh how the times have changed.
The current media and communications landscape as it relates to EMS was the focus of a talk given by Jeff Dyar and Paul LeSage at Fire-Rescue Med in Las Vegas on Friday. They argued that, for modern EMS organizations, it is imperative to understand and harness social media tools.
“You can’t sit on the sidelines and think you’ll be fine,” Dyar, owner of Far View Group Consulting, said.
Dyar and LeSage pointed to a number of potential risks and opportunities inherent in the use of social media by EMS and fire departments.
They stressed the importance of developing a social media policy for your agency, especially as the generation currently advancing through EMS ranks has grown up immersed in this technology.
“If you don’t teach paramedics to use social media responsibly, it’s your fault,” Dyar said. “Training is imperative.”
“Right now policies are being put together by people who don’t have insights into how to use social media,” LeSage, an EMT-paramedic and owner of Critical Decision Partners, added. He suggested managers should bring younger responders — those most familiar with social media — into social media policy discussions early on.
Policies should do more than specify how medics should and should not use media that depicts them on the job, the session was told. It is also important for agencies to begin looking at ways to incorporate social media into their public outreach.
They suggested using sites like Facebook and Twitter to alert residents of emergency situations, for example. Agencies can also use social media to set up CPR and AED training, they said, arguing that online classes are the future of community public safety education.
Of course, using technology in this way will also create an entire set of new headaches. EMS managers will have to consider all the new ways HIPAA laws could be violated through their agency’s use of social media.
And, LeSage warned, any outreach that your department engages in through social media can easily be subverted by hackers or malicious users.
The bottom line is that social media isn’t going away. Ninety-seven percent of kids in their teens and twenties are a part of at least one social network, Dyar said. Agencies ignore the needs of that demographic at their own risk.