Two years ago, Virginia Beach’s Department of Emergency Medical Services was having difficulty finding enough volunteers. Many people in the region were feeling financially stressed—a condition not conducive to civic engagement, says Bruce Nedelka, division chief and public information officer.
“When we have more economic difficulties, the pool of potential volunteers declines, because the people who would have stepped up when things were better are looking for a job—or a second job to make ends meet,” he says. “Their time to volunteer is diminished, and they can’t keep up with the certification and recertification needed. So we need to constantly groom a new group of people to take over the spots when people leave for various reasons, whether it’s job-related or family-related.”
To address these staffing issues, Nedelka spearheaded an innovative recruitment drive that has gone a long way in boosting both his own department’s volunteer roll and that of more than 111 EMS agencies that serve some 1.75 million people in southeastern Virginia. The campaign, BecomeEMS.org, kicked off during EMS Week in May 2010 and ran for a year.
To make it happen, two regional EMS councils—Tidewater EMS Council, which includes Virginia Beach and about nine other cities and counties; and Peninsulas EMS Council, which includes 16 counties—got together and applied for a $150,000 state grant to run a campaign to recruit not just new volunteers, but also career EMTs and paramedics for paid departments. Eighty percent of the funds came from the state; 20 percent came from donations.
With the funding, the two councils hired Rubin Communications Group, a public relations and marketing firm, to develop a media campaign that included radio and TV ads and to negotiate the media buy. One local TV station in particular got excited about participating. In exchange for running the ads on its station, Wavy-TV 10 had TV reporters do EMS-related news features, including one about a 15-year-old boy who suffered cardiac arrest at a skate park and was revived by EMS. “That gave us a bigger bang for the buck,” Nedelka says.
Another key part of the campaign was directing interested parties to a single web portal that includes hyperlinks to the correct contact person at their nearest EMS agency when they type in their ZIP code. The goal was to make it easy to get information about participating in EMS while avoiding burdening one agency or one person with fielding all the calls, Nedelka says.
Though the website received thousands of hits, it’s difficult to say how many people were specifically influenced by the campaign, as most of the new recruits they surveyed said they’d heard about EMS from a friend or relative, not the ads specifically, Nedelka says.
But there’s no question there’s more interest in EMS now than before. Prior to the campaign, about 20 people showed up for Virginia Beach’s twice-monthly EMS orientations. Today, they’re getting 50 people at orientations held three times a month. That’s translated into a larger volunteer force, which rose from 700 about two years ago to 1,100 today, along with a career staff of 56.
An added benefit: The campaign was a morale booster for the current volunteers. “Those people already in EMS saw this campaign and how well it was doing and really had a sense of pride that somebody is out there promoting what we do in a positive light,” Nedelka says.
“The success of the program’s format and informative, convenient portal website has produced talk about possibly expanding the campaign throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia,” he adds. “BecomeEMS.org was originally developed with that in mind and could be easily adapted for a statewide program.”
Read more at becomeems.org. Click on the TV & Radio link to view the TV spots.
New Tool Available to ID Poor Teamwork
Good teamwork is critical for the safety of EMS workers and their patients. Now researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and colleagues say they’ve developed a reliable tool to measure nine components of teamwork—and to identify potential conflicts that could compromise it.
“Emergency medical technician partners must work together to establish scene safety, load and move patients, deliver stabilizing care on scene and during transport, and transfer patient care to receiving facilities,” reads background information in the study, reported in the January–March issue of Prehospital Emergency Care, which describes the new survey tool. “An EMT must anticipate the actions and expectations of his or her partner with minimal disruption. Stress, fatigue, and frequent turnover in partnerships are common characteristics of EMS work that may threaten teamwork between EMT partners.”
To develop the tool, researchers sent questionnaires to EMTs and paramedics from 39 agencies across the United States asking them about their most recent partnership, including how well they communicated with their partner, how much they trusted their partner and how they dealt with conflicts. Analysis of the answers to 687 questionnaires determined that the EMT-TEAMWORK survey was a reliable means of measuring nine components of teamwork that have been found in other health care settings to have an impact on safety, quality and performance, according to the study.
“Despite the importance of teamwork in EMS, very little is known about how well EMS teams work together, what improves or derails teamwork, and what the implications are for conflict between EMS partners …,” said lead author P. Daniel Patterson, Ph.D., EMT-B, assistant professor of emergency medicine, in a university news release.
According to a study of three EMS agencies published in the February 2011 issue of the journal Health Services Network, EMTs worked with 19 different partners—and as many as 50 partners—annually. “We believe that our EMT-TEAMWORK survey will prove to be an effective and easy-to-use tool to assess the impact that teamwork has on safety outcomes in EMS,” Patterson says.
A copy of a short-form (30 question) survey and scoring instructions are available at informahealthcare.com/doi/full/
10.3109/10903127.2011.616260.
Ambulance Crash Report Focuses on Data Collection
If you go by the news reports, crashes involving ambulances pose a major risk to the safety of EMS workers. Yet coming up with reliable statistics on just how many vehicles are involved in accidents is difficult because crashes tend to be reported to local or state agencies and there’s wide discrepancies between how and what types of information are collected from place to place, according to a report by the Fire Protection Research Foundation released in November 2011.
For example, in Delaware, an investigation found that crash data prior to 2010 is unreliable because state police had been incorrectly interpreting ambulances coming to the scene of an accident scene as being “involved” in a crash. And in New Jersey, only licensed state agencies are required to report incidents, which in that state does not include private companies, according to the report. Then there are a few states that don’t collect the information at all.
Why does accurately capturing crash data matter? To improve vehicle and road safety, it’s important for experts to be able to thoroughly study the magnitude of the problem, along with details about the causes of crashes and the injuries involved.
To move toward a better understanding of ambulance crashes, the report, “Analysis of Ambulance Crash Data,” takes a state-by-state look at the available data and how it’s collected—and makes recommendations about how data should be collected moving forward. Read the report here: nfpa.org/assets/files//Research%20Foundation/RFAmbulanceCrash.pdf.
