MCHB Conference Webcasts
2005 EMSC Annual Grantee Meeting
April 12-13, 2005
TOMMY LOYACONO: Tommy Loyacono, Pediatrics Committee Chair for the National Association of Emergency Medical Technicians. NAEMT is the only national organization that's exclusively in place to represent prehospital providers. EMTs of all levels. It was founded in 1975. And it is purely a membership organization.
Okay. I spoke too soon, didn't I?
Our mission is to represent the views of prehospital personnel and to influence the advancement of EMS through educational programs, liaison activities and development and standards, standards and programs that benefit pre-hospital care providers.
In 2001, the pediatrics committee was formed through the vision of past president Nathan Williams, who saw a need to find a place to institutionalize EMSC activities within our organization. The pediatrics committee exists to promote proper prehospital care for children and to integrate proper pre-hospital pediatric services into the overall EMS system.
We've been active for a number of years on a lot of collaborative activities with many of the people in this room. We have a seat on the Partnership for Children's Stakeholders Committee, Poison Control Stakeholders Committee, and since our involvement with EMSC we've collaborated with many of the other partners on a number of important activities.
I have a few listed here. But the list goes on and on and it's too numerous to name.
Some of our major projects include development of community assessment guide to help develop help communities assess their ability to care for children and it looks at emergency care, primary care, pre-hospital care. We developed guidelines for pre-hospital family centered care and subsequently be on the same team CD‑ROM to instruct prehospital care providers in family centered care practitioners.
We recently did an evaluation of the jump‑start pediatric triage algorithm and our most recent project has just completed, we developed guidelines for pre-hospital response to medical emergencies at schools. This document is now posted on our website and I found out while I'm here that it's just been published in this month's issue of Emergency Medical Services Magazine. It's the cover story there. Within this project, there's a assessment tool ‑‑ it's self‑explanatory ‑‑ for use in a community to bring the emergency response community together with the school community to evaluate where they are to look at their respective plans, to make them talk to each other and fill gaps in services and identify places where one plan conflicts with another.
Part of NAEMT's mission is to educate prehospital providers. We have an individual membership, total about 17,000 at this point, and in addition to that we have 26 formal liaisons with state affiliates. We really don't know how many EMTs we represent through those affiliates. We have three major educational programs. The largest and oldest is our prehospital trauma life support program, which I hope many of you are familiar with. The new kid on the block is our Pediatric Pre-hospital Care Program. It's only about three years old. But it's already in our ‑‑ our courses have already been taught in 45 states, Puerto Rico , six other countries and three other countries are scheduled for the next 12 months.
Recent change in our Pediatric Pre-hospital Care Program, within the last few months we've had a change of a national medical director. We're pleased that Dr. Lu Romig from Miami has agreed to serve as our medical director. We think that's a very positive thing and we're very happy to have her associated with the program.
We have liaison activities with more than 40 national associations and organizations. Our current president, Ken Bovier, unable to be here, asked me to specifically tell this group of his support for the EMSC program and his desire to strengthen our bonds with these organizations and with you in any way that we can. We communicate with our membership in several ways. We have a national newsletter that's mailed to our members, but it's also available on our website for anyone. It's posted six times a year. The website has a variety of links as well as a lot of the products are posted on the pediatrics committee page that I mentioned earlier.
We also have an annual educational conference, and our next educational conference will be in New Orleans this coming August in association with the EMS expo and we hope that some of you will come join us there. Thank you.
(Applause)