Association Update: NAEMSP Wraps Productive 2018, Preps for 2019 Annual Meeting

It has been another wonderful year at the National Association of EMS Physicians (NAEMSP). Although our name suggests otherwise, NAEMSP is not just for physicians. A significant minority of our membership includes EMTs, paramedics, nurses, and researchers. All are welcome. NAEMSP remains committed to supporting prehospital providers with compassion and evidence-based guidance.  

One way NAEMSP supported providers is through its Political Action Committee’s success in lobbying with partners to pass H.R. 304, the Protecting Patient Access to Emergency Medications Act. This bill removed the requirement that EMS providers contact medical control before administering any controlled substance, allowing standing or verbal orders to have the same authority as online medical control.

By passing this bill, NAEMSP helped ensure that you, the provider, maintained the ability to treat patients appropriately and in a time-critical manner, without delay or fear of legal action. 

In 2017 the FDA listed 30 new drug shortages in addition to 41 continuing shortages. The NAEMSP PAC continued its legislative momentum by traveling to Washington, D.C. to attend the Duke Margolis Center for Health Policy Summit on drug shortages.

NAEMSP recognized how critical some of these shortages are to patient care, not only because of the necessity of certain drugs to treat conditions such as cardiac arrest but because of patient-safety risks that come with using a rarely encountered surrogate.

The summit represented an opportunity to educate our policymakers about this serious issue and how it affects EMS’ care of our communities. 

Outside of advocacy work, NAEMSP collaborated extensively with the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) as well as the American College of Surgeons Committee on Trauma (ACS-COT) to complete a multiyear effort relating to evidence-based practices on spinal motion restriction. After 36 revisions we published a combined position statement in the Prehospital Emergency Care journal that has been downloaded nearly 20,000 times. 

To find out more about what NAEMSP has accomplished, head to our recently reinvented website, https://naemsp.org. Over the past year it underwent a complete overhaul focused on making it both visually appealing and more user-friendly.

Despite how large this project was, we were able to complete everything without increasing membership dues thanks in large part to many hours of donated assistance from the Communications Committee, NAEMSP staff, and our partners at Kellen Company. 

It has been a great year for NAEMSP. We will continue to work for all our members and partners to provide the best care for our patients by advancing the field of EMS medicine. 

Our work continues at the NAEMSP 2019 Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas, January 10–12. We would love for you to join us! Thank you to all who have supported us and continue to do so. 

Brent Myers, MD, MPH, FACEP, FAEMS, is president of NAEMSP.

Hawnwan Philip Moy, MD, FACEP, FAEMS, is an emergency medicine/EMS physician at Washington University, medical director for Missouri ARCH Air Methods HEMS, and communications chair for NAEMSP.

Catherine R. Counts, PhD, MHA, is a senior fellow in the department of emergency medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine.