Updated July 17, 2015
As a newly minted paramedic in Florida in 1974, Don Lundy got his first big raise when the private ambulance service he was working for was acquired by Hillsborough County, making him a county employee. “I was making $1.60 an hour, and all of a sudden we were making $3.30 an hour,” he says. “We thought we had hit the jackpot. Then someone was supposed to come in and tell us about benefits. We didn’t know what that was!”
Today, Lundy is EMS director for Charleston County, S.C., where he oversees a department of 160 that covers 1,100 square miles in a coastal community with a population of 350,000.
“I’m blessed,” Lundy says. “I never, in a million years, thought I’d be working in paradise, with 160 awesome co-workers. This is a tremendous system that thought about the sick guy from the time it was developed until today. God directed me to end up here in Charleston, and I’m sure glad he did.”
Prior to coming to Charleston in 2000, Lundy worked as EMS director in Charlotte County, Fla.; as paramedic and station manager for Greenville County, S.C., EMS; and as director of Orangeburg County, S.C., EMS. He has a bachelor’s degree in health care administration. Lundy was elected NAEMT president in October 2010. He served two years as president-elect before starting his two-year term as president on Jan. 1, 2013.
Lundy spoke with Best Practices about the importance of EMS on the Hill Day, an NAEMT-led event during which hundreds of EMS professionals head to Washington, D.C., for two days of education about legislative advocacy and meetings with congressional staff, as well as other NAEMT initiatives.
What first attracted you to EMS, and what has kept you in the profession for 35-plus years?
When I went into EMS, my long-term goal was to join the FBI. At that young age, my lofty goal was to help people by taking bad people off the street. But I soon found that the care I wanted to give was not in line with what law enforcement typically does. So I became a dispatcher, and then a paramedic.
What I liked was in that one little corner of my world, I could change history. If somebody was dying of a heart attack and I managed to bring them back, I changed their history—and the history of their children, spouse, grandkids, neighbors and business associates. I changed history for many more people than I would ever meet. I realized the power we have as emergency medical providers far beats any power that I know of that’s out there.
I sure hope I get to keep being the boss for some time, because I like running the system, but if somebody said, ‘We don’t need you anymore,’ I could ride in the back of the ambulance all day and be happy.
EMS has many different factions and perspectives. On what issues will they speak ‘with one voice’ during EMS on the Hill Day this year?
All of our members have said they really want one federal voice that will stand for EMS. That is going to continue to be a primary focus, particularly with the new health care law and the changes we are going to see over the next few years. While FICEMS (Federal Interagency Committee on EMS) does a very good job, it is not one voice. By its very design, it’s multiple agencies that come together for the common good of EMS.
NAEMT’s position, and mine as well, is that the Department of Health and Human Services is the most logical department at the federal level and is going to be in the best position to articulate what EMS needs at the federal level over the long term. Surprisingly, when you talk to our members, most of the ones I’ve talked to say they really don’t care which agency it’s in; they just want someone to stand up.
Have you participated in EMS on the Hill Day before?
This will be our fourth year, and I’ve participated every time. I have watched this thing just blossom. It’s so exciting to see EMTs and paramedics actually be involved in the legislative process, meet their representatives and learn how the process works.
When you’re a paramedic, you’re on a different time clock. You’re on an eight-minute clock to respond, 15 minutes to transport, a 10-minute drop time at the hospital. Within an hour, whatever problem there is, you should try to fix it.
At an EMS director level, an NAEMT president level and certainly at a legislative level, you’re not working off the same clock. Particularly if we are talking about the legislative level, it’s a seven-year clock. On average, it takes seven years to get legislation passed, and that doesn’t account for writing the rules for it. Some of us with a one-hour clock say that’s ridiculous. But getting legislation passed is hard.
What I see during EMS on the Hill Day is the light comes on, and paramedics get it. They realize that even if the legislators never act on what they tell them, we get to teach them a little bit about EMS and what we do. It isn’t a one-hour clock or a one-time deal; this is a long-term project on educating Congress and the Senate about who we are.
The other side of EMS on the Hill Day is that afterward, elected representatives are calling us about something we have brought to their attention. Years ago, I would have never gotten a call from a federal legislator regarding much of anything; now I have gotten calls from my congressman and senator. I got a call from Sen. Barbara Boxer’s office about a question she had; it had nothing to do with the legislative slate we brought to them. She knew about NAEMT, and she had a constituent with an issue. I sat at the Reagan National Airport talking to her office. That was the result of a paramedic stepping into her office on EMS on the Hill Day and raising knowledge.
If people can’t travel to D.C. for the event, what else can they do to contribute?
They can start a relationship with their congressman or woman and senator. That’s a pretty easy thing to do: There are periods of time you can call the local office, find out when the congressperson or senator is in the office, and set up an appointment.
These meetings are very quick, so they should bring the NAEMT talking points and be prepared. One of the other things they can do is offer to do a ride-along so the legislator can see what EMS is like. Invite the press to take some pictures to give them some coverage. You can also do this at the local or state level.
The NAEMT safety course seems very successful. Why do you think this has resonated with your members?
I believe thousands have been trained, and we are still in the very early stages of the course. The goal was to teach as many as we could, but we also want as many people as possible to become instructors so we can spread it even further.
Safety in EMS has always been on the periphery. No one wanted to be unsafe, but when EMS was first created, we didn’t know what we didn’t know. We had a DOT manual, but no textbook. We were really kind of making it up as we went along, without a model to follow. When I was trained as a paramedic, safety was never talked about, except for making sure you didn’t get stuck with a needle. We never sat in a course and said, ‘Let’s talk about how to get out of a dangerous situation. Let’s talk about proper lifting. Let’s talk about driver safety.’
But EMS has grown up. The safety course represents a maturity level for EMS, and we now realize this is an important part of EMS education. I think that’s why the course has been so successful: People realize that safety impacts patient care. You can’t take care of patients if you’re not safe or if you’ve been injured, and we can’t take care of patients if we don’t take care of ourselves.
When I started in EMS, we were young, we were the heroes, and we thought, I haven’t got time to take care of myself. Some of us may be a year or two older now, and we’ve been able to look back at some of the safety issues. We now know that safety includes everything from how we eat or what we eat, to exercise, to keeping a global view of scene safety, to back and shoulder issues, to how equipment should be maintained. Safety needs to be a core component of what we do.
Tell us about the new ‘personal leadership’ course that NAEMT is developing. What is its purpose, and what will it cover?
We’re developing it now, so I’m not sure what it will ultimately look like. But we know our target audience is not the high-level leaders in EMS; it’s EMTs and paramedics who want to be a supervisor or that high-level leader someday, but need to know how to get to the point that they are ready to become a supervisor. It may cover ethical issues, the business side of EMS, people skills and dealing with employees. It’s how to talk to somebody and how to listen to somebody. We’re talking about preparing employees for leadership, and giving them tools and places they can go to expand their career so they are ready to take that next step.
A lot of people don’t know that it’s good to get a mentor, or that it’s good to seek additional education. In the field, a paramedic might say, ‘I’m going to get a bachelor’s degree.’ And someone else will say, ‘You don’t need a degree to be a better paramedic.’ I agree with that—the degree isn’t supposed to make you a better paramedic. It will give you a broader perspective that will make you a better leader. We’re urging people to step out of their comfort zone. I’m hoping the course will be ready by January 2014.
What do you think the future holds for EMS? Should we be optimistic or worried?
We should absolutely be optimistic. The idea that the bell rings, we go to the call, we put patients on a stretcher and take them to the hospital … while that will still be done, EMS will look much different down the road than it has in the past 25 to 30 years. Community paramedicine is going to expand. And you’re going to see some tremendous treatment modalities available to us that will reverse strokes in the field or make artificial blood available on ambulances for use with trauma patients.
You were a long-time foster parent. What motivated you to become one, and what impact did it have on you and your family?
My wife, Barbara, and I started as foster parents when we were 24 and living in Tampa, Fla. We saw a need: There is a group of children who are never picked up as foster children and it’s very hard to get them adopted. Those are kids between the ages of 10 and 17. Our goal was to try to get them from whatever situation they’re in—and some were pretty horrible situations—to a permanent placement through adoption or, once in a while, back to their parents.
We had 31 foster children over 10 years. The shortest one was with us for a day; the longest was nine months. We stay in touch with almost all of them. We had lost touch with one of them for a while, but we recently had dinner with her and her husband. She has four children and is doing great. That dinner was worth everything we went through—looking at her eyes and seeing how happy she is. Most all of the children we took in were just in a rough spot. And if somebody didn’t step in, they were going to go down the wrong path.
I would tell anybody who is interested that it can be the most rewarding experience you’ll ever have. Having said that, it’s not for the weak and timid. These children have seen things you can only imagine in your worst nightmares. You have to have that strong heart to understand that when these kids react, it’s not about you; they are just trying to get the demons out of them.
My wife and I also have one son, Robert—the pride of my life. He’s a tax preparer for H&R Block.
Tell us about a leadership mistake you made and what you learned from it.
Early in my career, I had an employee who was injured on the job to the point that he had to be transported to the hospital in an ambulance. I got a call early in the morning about it. It wasn’t life-threatening, so I rolled back into bed and went back to sleep. I had a supervisor and a safety officer there, and I knew they would take care of the employee.
I went a week without calling him or asking how things were going. Later on, this employee said he was upset that I didn’t come to the ED and see him. I was shocked—I didn’t know anybody wanted the boss around when they were injured. He told me, ‘I just wanted to make sure I had a job when I got better and came back to work.’
It gave me an eye-opening slap in the face that when someone is injured, they might be lying there wondering if they are going to get fired because they can’t work. As a result of that, if anybody is transported to the ED, I go. I always tell them, ‘You let me know when you are ready to come back to work. Don’t rush it. Your job is going to be there when you get back.’
Of all the times we speak of ourselves as a family, leaders need to realize we really are a family—and we need to treat ourselves like we are one. Fear has a tremendous power to devastate EMS systems over what we would think would be a trivial issue. If you have one person who feels the command staff didn’t care when they got injured, that becomes 20 people thinking that command doesn’t care when somebody got injured.
