Best Practices for Tough Times

Q&A with Stephen Williamson, President, American Ambulance Association; President, Emergency Medical Services Authority, Okla.

Coming out of 9/11--and, in Oklahoma, the Murrah Building six years before--what did you see as the greatest needs for EMS in its preparedness for terrorism and MCIs?

   With events like the Murrah Building and 9/11, the Metropolitan Medical Response System and things like that have been born, and Incident Command has taken on a greater role. On an emotional level, having an event happen in Oklahoma City made people aware that it can happen anywhere--and you don't have to live in a major population area for it to happen to you. That made all the concerns more real, and really put tensions on organizations to stay equipped. I know there's been some grant money for that, and some of us have been pretty fortunate with that, but there are a lot of costs the grants don't cover, that have to come out of revenues. That makes it tough.

How have grants come around for privates?

   There is still a discrepancy in what the private sector has access to vs. the public. A lot of what we have comes through with partnerships with the public side. There has been a break in the dam, a little, but it's still not 100% equal.

Can you elaborate on those partnerships? What's working well?

   In various communities, equipment has been made available through stockpiles for use in disasters. Besides preparedness, that's helped open up avenues of communication, whether it's directly to federal program authorities or locally with whoever's applied for and gotten the resources, and made them available to the private side to use in emergencies.

In this tough economy, how should we go about sustaining what we've achieved?

   That's something we're trying to figure out right now, as we hear about these grants coming to an end. How will we sustain things? Can we get the hospitals, since they're such big proponents now of these teams and things we have in place, to help fund them? It's something we're concerned about. We know the value of these things, so we just have to find ways to fund them.

For private services and EMS in general, what should be our priorities moving forward?

   If the funding is not going to be available to sustain the present equipment and training and so forth, we have to determine if there's a better way to provide those services. Now that we have some experience, are we researching the best practices being demonstrated through these tough times? Can we institute those in a more focused way? With anything new, we had to make some assumptions as to how it all would work, and I'm sure there was money that could have been spent better. So can we now provide the protection at a lesser cost, and still fund it?

As 9/11 recedes into history, what are the big lessons younger providers should take from it and carry forward?

   I think new providers today actually are coming into the business more prepared than we were. They know the risks involved and what can happen. I think they're more attuned, and I'm glad they understand that. We don't have to ask them twice to get the training. The younger employee now takes it very seriously, and it's part of their decision-making to get in the profession.