Am I Seeing a Change? Part 1

Earlier this year, Steve Whitehead and Natalie Quebuedeaux coined the phrase “Make your own Thunder.” It has quickly become one of my favorite phrases. Here’s my story, broken down into two parts, about the rumbles that I’ve created over the last week. . .

For the last couple of years, I’ve been a member of the National EMS Management Association (NEMSMA) List Serv through Google. It’s a hotbed of conversation and information about the industry, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in furthering their career in EMS. Quite often, I would find posts or articles that seemed very relevant to the issues faced within my company, so I would copy and paste like mad to some of my colleagues, hoping that it would have some impact.

This practice increased ten fold this past February when I became involved in the Social Media movement in EMS. As I have read more blogs, I’ve grown more and more excited about the information that had been right under my nose. Who would have thought that there were so many people out there with the same ideas and motivations that I had? Quite often, I would send the copied and pasted articles and links out, and I wouldn’t really hear back from anyone. I knew a few people read them, but I never really got much feedback about what they were reading.

In the last week, that changed.

It all started last Wednesday when I got an email from one of my main “targets” of all of my forwards, our Operations Manager. It asked a simple question: “Can you send me the links to what you read and listen to?” I was really excited, and I got right to work. I started going through my bookmarks, sharing every podcast, blog, and publication that I frequent. While he is a very open minded guy, and thinks along the same track that I do, here was my chance to really open up his eyes to what was out there.

By Friday, I had already received a number of links from him pointing out articles and posts that he really liked. By Sunday, he had sent out an email to our entire management team that included an article about Customer Service that he had found, and he credited its discovery to me. Sunday evening, one of our Station Supervisors approached me and said “Hey, where did you get that article that Patrick sent out?” I gave him the link to EMS Responder, and said, “Hey, while you’re at it, take a look at these.” I had a few posts from Steve Whitehead’s blog, The EMT Spot sitting on my desk that I shared with him, and then handed those off to a crew that was in our office with us. Everyone was eager to hear more.

Then, who comes through our door? Our Training Coordinator, who picks up shifts on the road from time to time. This was going to be his last road shift for a while, because we had a New Employee Academy starting the next day. That’s right, for the next two weeks, we were going to have 13 brand new “sponges” at our disposal, ready to soak up whatever information we could throw at them.

A light bulb went on as I realized the great opportunity I had before me. “Hey, Dave,” I asked him, “Can I borrow you for a minute?” I sat him down at my computer and started into my sales pitch. . .

To be continued . . .