Annual EMSC Grantee Meeting

Ambulatory Pediatric Association Update

June 20 – 22, 2006

JANE BALL: Hi, I’m Jane Ball and I’m happy to be here for, probably about my 20th EMSC Grantee Meeting, which is always an energizing experience for me. I just want to give you a little bit of information about some of the activities that we’ve been engaged in over the last year and some additional information.

Biggest focus for us has probably been technical assistance. Those of you with new partnership grants certainly understand the change in focus that you’ve been engaged in and the whole focus on the performance measures, making sure that you have the resources that you need to address the performance measures such as the implementation manual, the technical assistance to help you as you begin the data collection process or the strategic planning to help you decide how you’re going to begin addressing the changes needed within your state to meet some of the performance measures expectations in the next five years.

The electronic handbook, I mean, there are several of you that we have been identifying and trying to make sure that you get your information and to be registered and meeting reporting requirements, those final reports that you needed to get in, that kind of thing. As well as the educating and informing activities to help a lot of our state and national decision-makers understand what is the value of the EMSC program.

The focus on technical assistance, for us, has meant that we’ve actually expanded our staff to do technical assistance. We have a new person added to our staff who is Jocelyn Holbert and we’ve also increased Diana Fendia’s time. So, we actually have more ability to provide more dedicated technical assistance to you all.

The other thing that we’ve been doing is making sure that we’ve been collaborating with NEDARC because it was vitally important for both resource centers to make sure we were consistent in the information that we’re sharing with you with regard to the performance measures, the expectations and we’ve had several joint electronic meetings just to make sure that we both understand the expectations and, in fact, we’ve included Dana and Tina in those conversations because we wanted to make sure all of us were speaking the same language and not confusing you with some of those expectations.

One of the things that will be coming over the next year is the NRC is expecting to develop a leadership project management guide that will help those of you, especially the number of new coordinators or EMSC managers that we’ve acquired over the last two years. We feel like we need to go back and bring in some of the real basic information on how do you approach managing, how do you do coalition building, how do you bring people together, how do you educate and inform folks to help you implement some of the changes that need to be done. So, we’re going to be giving you the opportunity to give us some content ideas because we need to know what’s the information you need so that we can tailor this to your expectations.

We have also been working with the EMSC program, helping Dan to do some of the webcast and we have two webcasts that are planned for this summer. On August 22nd we’re going to have a webcast that’s specifically targeted to state and local EMS Medical Directors. We have involved some representatives. I know Cathy Brown is involved from the National Association of EMS Physicians and others. So, this is something that we’re going to be communicating to you all and we would like you to share this, so that your state and local medical directors can get informed about the EMSC performance measure that’s focused on online and offline medical direction. The other webcast is September 27th and that’s going to focus on pediatric trauma system issues. So, we’re going to talk about the triage issues, medical direction, trauma system planning, trauma center critical components. So, this is something for everybody in the audience, but you might want to share this with the folks in your state who are doing trauma system development.

There we go. Okay. The other activity that we’ve been engaged in, in these past years is the development of a new website for the EMSC Program and this is a website that is going to be residing on the HRSA server. There is a website on the HRSA server right now but this is a newly designed website that’s going to have lots of features that will be of value to you. We are in the process of transitioning the most updated information to HRSA so that it can be posted. We just went online this morning and the shell that’s up is not working but I promise you that it’s going to be there very soon. And this is what we expect will be the website address for you to get to the website. And I want to show you a couple of the features on this website so that you’re going to know what is new and different.

Okay. This is what the homepage looks like. And we have, certainly, a navigation bar that you can get to various activities fairly easily here. EMSC news, this is kind of like current information that we’ll be posting on a fairly regular basis. And then there’s a toolbox, which is intended to be a more detailed information and resources on a particular topic. And the first toolbox is on pain management and emergency care, and if you want to see the details of that we actually have a handout about this toolbox that is back on the table. But it’s going to give you -- will highlight someone involved in Pediatric Pain Management and in this case it’s Dr. Holly Apenas.

We have website resources. We have NRC resources. We have information for families that is involved in this particular toolbox. And we will be adding additional special content features. So, we’ll be changing the toolbox periodically but archiving the current one.

We have a lot of state information. If you see the -- I guess the -- if you see the state activity thing. Anyway, grant information is there for you to look at. So, you’ll first get a map, you pick a state, and then there will be a list of different grants that have occurred in that state, current grants and you can pick one. In this case, I just picked out Ohio State Partnership Grant and you will be able to see who the EMSC Coordinator is. That will be updated if there’s a family representative, who that individual is, and then there’s additional information that you can’t see but it will help you stay in contact. This is going to be run through a database. The folks at HRSA tell us that they’re very willing to kind of, down, I guess, link into our server where this website lives and the database running it. So, we’re going to be updating this information on a weekly basis. They’re supposed to come in, get our newest database information, and so this will keep this information current rather than us going in with a hard code change every time something happens.

The other thing that we have is the listing of all the state statutes and I think where we have the regulations. We’re constantly searching for a lot of the regulations and Karen Belly and Susan Ethrol are actually doing a lot of the legal research to identify specific regulations related to the performance measures and as we have that information available, it will also be posted so that we will be giving you what other states have used for model language that you may want to think about implementing in your own state.

Products and resources I know, everybody is interested in getting to the EMSC products and so we’ve set-up a page where you can go in and you can look for something by name or by keyword. There’s a drop-down list that will help you sort through this. The resources are going to be those things that haven’t been produced by the EMSC Program but are relevant. The products are things that grantees have developed; we’re trying to add to those items, the electronic resources that we have from state’s products that have been developed. We have moved to the NEDARC website because we’re not going to be allowed to post them on this website because they haven’t been through the federal clearance process. But when you get the information to a particular product, there’s going to be the link to the product and it will take you directly to where it’s location on the NEDARC website. And similarly, a resource will be linked, will have a website link so that you can go directly to that resource and identify where it is.

We also have a section for families, so that you can learn more about how the family representatives are working and contributing to the EMSC program. It’s another location where you can find the names of other family representatives but then, there’s publications related to families centered care that is available.

So that’s just a brief overview, there’s lots of other resources in here. The left navigation bar actually will branch out and you will be able to see the subheads underneath it and get lots more information.

I just want to tell you about a new resource that is just getting ready to go online at the American College of Surgeons National Trauma Data Bank and this is the report form the National Trauma Data Bank about Pediatric Trauma Care. And it has a data for a very large number of injured children form the years 2000 to 2004, and Melanie Neil told me that this should be online and available to you, probably by the end of this week.

And then last I want to say in terms of a lot of the work we do is support for the EMSC Program particularly to help Dan and Tina with a lot of their work. The EMSC partnership for children stakeholder group, we facilitate that. We monitor and provide information on EMSC appropriations and re-authorization language and a lot of other information relevant to pediatric emergency care issues is one of the things that we’re constantly providing that updated information to Dan and Tina. We do some supportive activities for the PECARN. We now expect that we’ll be assisting Dan and Tina with the development of the strategic plan based upon the recommendations in the IOM report.

And last but not the least is, the EMSC Program is being re-assessed through the part process and we’re working to develop a long-term outcome measure and some supportive documentation for that. So that hopefully the next time the program will come out and have -- meet some expectations to show that we’re making progress at least from the Office of Management and Budget with regard to the program. So, I’m going to turn it over to Mike now.