Highlights From the June 5, 2024 FICEMS Meeting

The June 5, 2024, virtual meeting of the Federal Interagency Committee on EMS (FICEMS) covered topics such as the USFA’s EMS Branch, the Department of Transportation's National Roadway Safety Strategy, and funding being made available under the Hospital Preparedness Program. 

According to the U.S. government website ems.gov, "The Federal Interagency Committee on Emergency Medical Services (FICEMS) was established by Congress in 2005 to ensure coordination among Federal agencies supporting local, regional, State, tribal, and territorial EMS and 911 systems. FICEMS was also created to improve the delivery of emergency medical services (EMS) throughout the nation." 

Here are some of the highlights:

USFA EMS Branch in Growth Mode 

The United States Fire Administration (USFA) continues to push ahead with building its own EMS Branch. “We have gone, from our last [FICEMS] meeting of three full-time people in the branch to five full-time people in the EMS branch,” said Richard Patrick, FICEMS Chairperson, Director of the USFA’s National Fire and Emergency Medical Services Division, and Acting Director of the USFA’s National Fire Data & Research Center Division. [In fact], “the USFA EMS program is expanding pretty much on track. We have regular meetings, monthly meetings with all the NGOs that provide EMS in the nation to keep each of us up to date on current trends, issues, and topics. We also provide a weekly health security awareness report specifically to health, the potential of pandemics, and information like that to all the NGOs on a weekly basis.” Patrick added that the USFA is adding an EMS component to its annual Summit of Fire Prevention and Control, which will be held in October 2024.

NHTSA Pursues ‘Zero Deaths’ Goal 

“The Department of Transportation's National Roadway Safety Strategy has set a national goal of zero deaths on our nation's roadways,” said Gam Wijetunge, Director of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) Office of Emergency Medical Services, during the June 5th FICEMS meeting. “It’s guided by the safe system approach and its five components of safer people, safer roads, safer vehicles, safer speeds, and post-crash care. So I wanted to provide the committee an update on some of our post-crash care efforts.” 

To this end, funding of an interagency review of EMS pre-hospital blood transfusions has been announced, Wijetunge said. As well, “Just a few months ago we published another 10-year retrospective report on special crash investigations,” he noted. “I do want to remind the community about one of the key findings from these investigations and that is the importance of getting clinicians in the field to wear their safety belts. Buckle up is the number one safety action that we have to continue to encourage our clinicians in the field to do to keep them safe.”

HPP Has Money! 

Finally, someone is showing us the money! Specifically, “we're pleased to announce that the notice of funding opportunity for the period of performance of 2024 to 2028 of the Hospital Preparedness Program has been released,” said Jonathan Greene, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Administration for Strategic Preparedness & Response. “HPP prepares the health care delivery system to save lives, meet community needs, and provide equitable access to care during disasters and emergencies. The reason I bring this up, as you may recall, [is] that EMS is a critical component of the healthcare coalitions that are at the very heart of HPP in each one of the recipient locations. And we're always looking for ways to utilize HPP to help EMS in communities around the country.”

Homeland Security Update EMS Protocols 

When people think of the Department of Homeland Security, chances are they don’t associate it with EMS. But the truth is that Homeland has about 4,000 EMS personnel scattered throughout its different components, said Dr. James Fenno, a Commander with the U.S. Public Health Service and Acting Medical Director of DHS Emergency Medical Services. To keep them current, “we just updated and distributed our protocols,” he said. “Those have not been updated for a couple of years, so it was nice to finally get those dusted off and we just got those released.”  

DHS is also working to standardize medical records across its various branches. “And then for the future, we're going to work on dusting off a couple policy and procedural documents, " Dr. Fenno said. “Lastly, we have a canine medical care training [course] that is going to be, I believe, available in the last quarter of this year.”

FCC Improving 911/988 Call Routing 

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is continuing its efforts to improve 911/988 emergency call routing. 

“In January of this year, the commission adopted an order in which it imposed new requirements on wireless carriers to improve the routing of 911 calls from wireless devices,” said David Furth, Deputy Chief of the FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau. “Carriers have developed the capability to use the caller's actual location as opposed to the location of the cell tower to route most wireless calls and the Commission in January. [It has] required carriers to do that. We anticipate that this is going to result in millions more wireless 911 calls every year being answered by the correct call center for the caller's location as opposed to having to be transferred. And that will, of course, have a beneficial effect on the speed of response/speed of dispatch for medical calls.” He added that the FCC now plans to do the same for 988 suicide hotline calls, which currently can be made from one state and answered in another.

NEMSIS Updates Drug Overdose Dashboard 

The National Emergency Medical Services Information System (NEMSIS) is the system used to collect, store, and share EMS data from U.S. states and territories. NEMSIS also develops and maintains a national standard for documenting patient care information associated with prehospital EMS activations. 

Speaking at the FICEMS meeting, Jeremy Kinsman (Emergency Medical Services Specialist with the NHTSA’s Office of EMS) reported that the NEMSIS Technical Assistance Center (NEMSIS TAC) has released a new version of the Non-Fatal Drug Overdose Surveillance dashboard. This new version “includes all non-fatal drug overdoses and can be filtered by whether the overdose was related to an opioid or a stimulant,” he said. “I've also been working with the HHS Office of Climate Change and Health Equity to survey heat-related EMS activations across the country. We're hopeful, and anticipate that the dashboard will be a valuable tool for our federal, state, and local partners that are working on heat-related health risks prevention and interventions.” 

To learn more about FICEMS and its many activities, go to www.ems.gov/resources/federal-interagency-committee-on-ems-fic/.