You know, it would not be EMS World Expo if I did not share a recap during my plane ride home.  Right now, we are at a cruising altitude of about 35,000 feet somewhere over Wisconsin en route back home from my layover in Minneapolis.  There is some light turbulance, but it really is not that bad.  The trip home is more than half over, and I should be on the ground in about an hour and a half, so lets get right to it. EMS World Expo, as it was known as this year, was sponsored once again by EMS World Magazine.  The Zoll Blogger Bash that was held Tuesday night was an incredible time that you can read about here.  Wednesday, all of the hard work started. Just like last year’s trip to Dallas, my three days at the convention center were busy ones, but in a very different way.  I did not get to take as many classes as I did last year, but I made the most of the ones that I did make it to.  A majority of my time was spent on the floor, and more specifically, at the Podcasting Studio and Social Media Lounge.  Each day, I was on a show, and I even got to do two of them on Friday. Wednesday, I pinch hit for Chris Ceballero on EMS Leadership and got a chance to have a fascinating interview with Bob Loftus about the traveling  EMS Museum.  Thursday was First Few Moments.  Our topic could be most simply described as enviornmental safety, an expansion on scene safety.  How does one handle themselves and stay safe when the potential scene expands from a few hundred feet to possibly a few hundred miles? Friday I joined Natalie Quebodeaux on the Gen Med Show for a discussion that started with finding the right fit for the provider, and seemed to expand to changing the entire field to better fit the provider.  It was a fascinating discussion featuring Natalie, Sam Bradley, Anne Robinson (better known as @CaringAnne on Twitter) and I that is a must listen for anyone who is new to the field.  There were some points that...

My secod EMS Expo Eve is in the books and boy was it a fun one. Hurricane Irene pushed my flight back a day and I did not get into town until almost a full day later than I had initially planned.  For those of you who are wondering, my area did not get hit very bad, but to the north of us there was a considerable amount if flooding. After getting settled in, and a great dinner at Margaritaville complete with one of their staff sliding down off of a volcano and into a blender, it was off to the Hard Rock Cafe on the strip.  Zoll was once again our gracious host and thanks to Charlotte and her team, we all had a great time.  Zoll secured the third floor of the Cafe (yes the whole thing) complete with an outdoor seating area full bar, and appetizers. What started a year ago with eight friends getting together at the House of Blues in Dallas had now grown to a group of close to one hundred conference attendees and social media gurus.  It provided a great chance for all of us to make some new friends and, for those of us who have not seen each other since EMS Today in March, it gave us an opportunity to catch up with some old friends. If you have never been to Las Vegas, you should know that it is a city that never sleeps, and last night was no exception.  Some of us got to bed at two or three AM, and others did not get to sleep at all.  Today being the first true day of EMS Expo though meant that many of us had to be up early to help set up booths, make classes, and nurse our hangovers. The time since I drove out of Baltimore back in March has seemed to fly by. Some people like Justin, Natalie, and Random, I’ve talked to quite a bit over the last couple of months, and others I have not seen since we parted ways at the Pratt Street Ale House some six months ago.  Regardless, there never seems to be enough time...

If you had the power to change the world, what would you do?  Well, here’s a news flash, there should be no “if” in this sentence.  We all have the power to change the world, and the group here at the First Responders Network is setting out to do just that. Next Friday, we will be releasing the first edition of “Interventions: An EMS 2.0 Perspective of the Field” the new quarterly magazine from the authors of the First Responders Network.  It will be a ground breaking, trend setting publication that will be published online containing not only articles from the FRN Bloggers and some guest authors but video and audio content as well, all geared towards solving many of the issues that we face every day. The first edition has been a two month project that many of us have kept rather quiet, but that time is over!  The URL will be released next Friday, and the free online magazine will be out there for all of you to read. Keep an eye on Twitter, and watch out facebook page for updates....

This Post can also be found at the First Few Moments website. What sorts of contingency plans does your department have?  Are you ready for anything?  For instance: what would your staff do if there was a sudden crash of your communication infrastructure?  Are they assigned a centralized meeting location?  Does your current radio system support a backup frequency that allows your units to talk to each other? Issues like this one lived quite often in the back of my mind prior to this year.  In the last three months though, my service has faced a tornado, an earthquake, and as I write this post, we are staring down Hurricane Irene which is threatening to make landfall in New England sometime late Saturday or early Sunday.  I am writing this on Wednesday, which means my service has four days to hash out every “what if” we can think of.  It’s a constant challenge to expect the unexpected, but it is something that we must do. In a previous post, I discussed how social media kept me informed of what was going on when an earthquake struck the east coast.  While my texts, tweets, and status updates went through, my phone calls did not.  It didn’t matter if I was calling a friend in Virginia or my parents in New Jersey, it was all met with either poor reception or no reception at all.  I’ll pause for you all to make your “Well, you have AT&T jokes…” Done?  Okay, good. My main point is, in a disaster, as much as we would like to, we cannot expect to rely on cell phones or even landlines.  What we need is training, policy, and a plan.  “If dispatch goes down, meet up at the corner of Main Street and Central Street.”  Give your crews a place to go and regroup, and put in the hands of senior staff a means by which to get the calls to those crews.  At that point, it does not matter how it gets done, the focus should be in minimizing the interruption of service as much as possible. A while ago, I talked about how great my part time job was.  I say...

I was sitting in my office on Tuesday afternoon working on some blog posts, research and plans for my upcoming trip to Las Vegas.  As usual, on my top monitor (I have two) I had Tweetdeck running alongside iTunes.  As I heard a plane flying overhead, I started to feel something weird.  I was leaning back and balancing on my chair as I typed, and it felt like it was shaking.  I leaned back to anchor the chair against my second desk, but the shaking did not stop. My office is off of my living room, and as I looked out towards my front door I noticed that a lamp sitting next to my couch had started swaying, and my cat, who had previously been fast asleep on the arm of the chair had her ears turned back, and really didn’t look happy.  That is when it dawned on me: Earthquake?  Earthquake! It is not often that an earthquake hits the east coast, but given the recent weather patterns we’ve been dealing with (Snow, tornado etc.) I really am not surprised by anything.  I still wasn’t sure what had happened though.  I looked out my front door, and all was well in my quiet little neighborhood, no big cracks in the ground, the earth hadn’t opened up and swallowed my Jetta, so all was well as far as I was concerned. When I got back to my desk, I looked up at Tweetdeck, and noticed that my feed was flooded with comments about the earthquake.  Literally maybe 30 seconds had passed since the shaking had stopped, and I saw reports from all over the east coast: Richmond, VA, Boston, MA, New York City, Philadelphia, New Jersey.  Through the power of social media, I already was getting an idea of what was going on without even having to turn to the television. That took me back to the tornado that had hit back on June 1st of this year.  As soon as the tornado touched town, twitter started up.  Many of us, myself included, posted alerts and updates as we got them.  Throughout the night, I was always putting posts up to let my friends...