I recently had two articles published by EMS1 as a couple of “mythbusting primers” on the topic of dynamic deployment. The articles were Dynamic deployment: 5 persistent myths busted and Dynamic deployment: 5 more persistent myths busted. My intention was not to convince anyone of a position that opposes their current EMS world view pertaining to deployment models, but I had hoped […]

The tools used in EMS are constantly changing, but one of the most powerful devices available to nearly every ambulance is the smartphone. However, the vast majority of these devices are owned personally by the crew assigned to any rig. While this may be acceptable to the employee who retains control over the personalization of their own device, […]

An awful lot can happen in five years. I know that my own understanding of EMS deployment has deepened a great deal in that time. It was that long ago that I wrote a post about The Cost of Saving Money using Lexington County, SC, as an example. The county EMS Director, Brian Hood, and the now-retired […]

Anyone who follows my posts here, or on Twitter, will recognize that I consistently argue for the value of prompt responses by emergency vehicles to nearly all incidents. However, this post will be different thanks to an inventive challenge through EMS Basics asking bloggers to consider an opposing view to their favorite topic. You can read […]

When EMS professionals complain, the justification often includes an appraisal of how our family in the ‘big red trucks’ do (or sometimes, don’t do) things instead of comparing ourselves to our brothers and sisters that make up that ‘thin blue line’. The choice of comparison is most likely swayed by the fact that somewhere around half of us working in EMS do […]

It is not hard to find an article that bashes the industry’s insistence on measuring response time as a performance goal. The latest one I saw was published just today in “Don’t let response times overshadow the role of EMS” by the respected author Arthur Hsieh. The flow of his article follows the traditional pattern of […]

Two weeks ago, we started a Community of Practice to discuss EMS Deployment. The larger issue of deploying resources is all about efficiency and effectiveness in care, those are also the aims of any High Performance EMS group. However, that message is too often confused with meaning simply “better, faster, cheaper”, when in practice it […]

As I was going to be in Dallas for the Fire Rescue conference, I decided to go a little early and pay a visit to MedStar Mobile Healthcare (the renown “birthplace of Mobile Integrated Healthcare”) just over in Fort Worth, Texas.  For anyone who may not have been paying attention to the industry during the last […]

In our recently published book, “Dynamic Deployment: A Primer for EMS“, John Brophy and I established a dichotomy between the standards of static deployment and dynamic deployment in the very first chapter.  Fortunately, that strong polar perspective has spurred some interesting discussions for me. While the check-out lane analogy was effective in distinguishing some of the differences of static […]

There is plenty of talk about “evidence-based procedures” in EMS lately. Well, today I read an interesting article that shows a link between being busier and better patient outcomes. Okay…, now after reading that statement, what just happened to your heart rate? Was your automatic response to click the link in order find fault so you can dismiss the finding, […]