Annual EMSC Grantee Meeting

National Updates:

National Association of State EMS Officials Update

June 20 – 22, 2006

BOB BASS: Thank you. I was asked to give a brief update on what we are now calling NASEMSO. And anyway, the problem with being involved with multiple organizations is that all the acronyms start to kind of blur together, and between N-A-E-M-S-P-E-N and N-A-S-E-M-S-O, NASEMSO, it gets really hard. And of course, it was the state directors and I changed that during my tenure. And so, I guess, I only have myself partially to blame. But what I wanted to do is take a couple of minutes to go over this new structure because I read internet things periodically where people go like, “How about sending this to the state directors or whatever they are today.”

So, I wanted to go over how this came about and how actually, I think, it’s a good thing and really structuring is much better for the future. I’ll start by saying, first of all, that the association was established in the early 1980s. In fact, Susan McHenry --Susan, you were the first president, were you not? Yes. And it was in 1981, but I wasn’t really sure, wasn’t it, Susan --1981? Is that right?

SUSAN MCHENRY: Yes.

BOB BASS: So, I said early 1980’s because last night I wasn’t sure, but it was set up earlier as a forum for the state directors and the state officials to chat about state issues. In the early 2000s, we actually had a group of state medical directors who wanted to get together. So, we created a forum for them and they have been meeting for four or five years now and we found that to be very, very effective forum. Because there are a lot of things that state directors find useful in sharing and issues regarding protocols and discipline and a whole myriad of issues, and so, it was very, very successful. So, we started contemplating this issue of do we want to create other councils? And actually last year, the state training coordinators, as many of you know have been around --actually they were around longer than state directors, started having some organizational challenges and we thought it was a good opportunity to invite them to merge. And we were successful in doing that.

And I think, again the concept is that the state training coordinators with rare exception are really folks who were in the state EMS office, and it made sense for what they do to be better coordinated with the state directors and the medical directors. So, it seemed like a logical fit and it was really that move that let us consider changing the by-laws to create a National Association State EMS Officials. So, with a concept was that eventually we’d have a series of councils that address different disciplines within the state office. So, we did that. I got the time frame later on the next slide, I believe, but we thought we would sort of slow down but then last year the state EMS data managers met and they wanted to form a council. And more recently, at the Trauma EMS meeting, the state trauma managers obviously with the demise of the Trauma EMS program, felt they needed to form as well, so now we have added them.

There’s a lot of benefits of all this; I’ve alluded to some of them. But again, we’re bringing all of these in the state office together which really improves the coordination between all of these disciplines within the state EMS office. In terms of association, I think, it gives us much more depth and expertise and the ability to tap into a variety of folks that we tap into back at home. But now we can do it in a national level. I think it makes sense in financial standpoint. We got one management, one association rather than a series of them that are associated with state office function. And clearly, I think, it positions us much better for the future.

So, we set about -- we changed our by-laws, we proved that the by-laws changed back in October; actually it wasn’t difficult at all to do, we made the changes back in October and set up the ability for the executive committee in the future to add councils. We are doing a council, what we call council charter. Rather than create different charters for each council, we are going to create one template charter that will, in essence, provide the same operating parameters and terminologies for the different councils. Each council has a representative on the executive committee and a vote at the business meeting. We’ve been busy setting up list servers and teleconferences to all those groups to continue communications at a national level.

Our plan, this is a going to be of bit of a challenge, is to have the councils meet in conjunction with our mid-year and annual meeting and in fact, for the mid-year meeting, which starts technically later today but really tomorrow and Friday, we’ve got over a hundred people registered, which is like for the mid-year meeting is a real record. And we’re going to have the councils meeting. And our task will be to coordinate how we can have the councils meet in advance of the whole association business meeting because ideally what they do would feed into what we’d do in business meeting. So now, these are our councils and the latest debate (inaudible) is whether or not the state directors want to have their own councils.

So, we’ll talk about that but I see some advantage to just the state directors themselves being able to come together in their own forum. And then we would have a universal forum at some point that would meet. This is just a graph that shows how this works out. We’re still are going to have our regions and committees and councils that we’ll continue to serve and we’ll have the same reps, the difference on the executive committee is that we’ll have a representative from each council and each council will have a vote.

If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to give me a holler or Beth Armstrong and we’d be happy to share some additional information with you; there’s our website. Anne told me I could take a couple of minutes to see if anybody had any questions about this organization -- these organizational changes. Good. I will tell you there are number of national issues that we’re working on as well; one of the things we got a task force, it’s meeting jointly with AIMS and NAEMSP looking at other medical issues and that sort of a growing topic, and we’ve got a number of other issues that we’ve recently have a grant that we’ve gotten through NHTSA to do our planning for pan flu and that’s getting on the way. We brought aboard Cathy Robinson who’s going to help us with that grant not only that grant, but help us with some of the councils.

So, we’re very excited about getting Cathy. Many of you may know her, she was with ENA for years and we’re very fortunate to have her now at staff with our association. All of us reacting to the IOM report, we’ve had at least one preliminary teleconference and we’ll continue to work on that. Dan and I were having a real discussion before the session and somebody came up to me at the IOM after the press conferences, “I bet you’re glad this is over.” I said, “I don’t think this is over.” In fact, if I had to put a word on it I’d say, “I think it’s just beginning.” So, I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of fertile ground for dialogue in the next couple of days with lots of state directors but I thank you for the opportunity to have given you the update. Thank you.