Preparing for the Future: Exploring Highlights From NEMSAC

February 7-8 marked the first 2024 meeting of the National EMS Advisory Council (NEMSAC). Once again, the in-person meeting was held at the Hyatt Place Georgetown in Washington, DC. The session was also hosted online for remote viewing.

According to EMS.gov, “The NEMSAC consists of 25 members of the EMS community who represent different aspects of the profession. The members are appointed by the Secretary of the Department of Transportation for two-year terms, and each may serve up to two terms.”

Here are some selected highlights from the February 7-8th meeting. As always, some of the quotations have been edited for clarity and flow.

Preparing for the Next Pandemic

Federal Interagency Committee on EMS (FICEMS) chairperson Richard Patrick provided an update on his committee’s activities at the NEMSAC meeting. He is also Director of the United States Fire Administration’s National Fire and Emergency Medical Services Division.

During his talk, Patrick noted that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are working with the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR) “and the National Emerging Special Pathogens Training and Education Center to improve nationwide EMS response during pandemics, because they observed a loss of capacities and capabilities that we had previously built with Ebola response,” he said. “Some of these projects include the development of clinical guidance for patient transport and PPE protocols under ASPR.”

Grants to Reduce Roadway Deaths

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Gam Wijetunge, Director of its Office of EMS, spoke about NHTSA’s National Roadway Safety Strategy. “Our focus within the NHTSA Office of EMS has been on improving care to patients injured in crashes,” he said. “We know there are approximately 169,000 patients that are seriously injured in crashes every year ... Far too many folks are struck by vehicles on the roadways, both EMS fire police and tows.”

To combat roadway fatalities, NHTSA is underwriting local, regional, and tribal safety initiatives through the $5 billion, five-year Safe Streets and Roads for All program. For instance, one ‘SS4A’ grant is funding “a $2.4 million pilot to the Town of Colonie EMS for emergency transponder systems to alert drivers of crashes, as well as a platform to interface with specialty care registries,” said Wijetunge. As well, “the city of Burlington in Vermont received a $1.1 million grant for several activities including traffic signal preemption.”

Making Progress on Paramedic Practitioners

During the last meeting on November 15-16, 2023, NEMSAC Adaptability & Innovation Subcommittee Chair David Fifer (who is also an Assistant Professor and Online Degrees Coordinator at Eastern Kentucky University) detailed their efforts to have paramedics with Master’s degrees designated as federally recognized practitioners.

“We collected a great deal of stakeholder input at that last meeting and we worked pretty hard to reflect all of that input into a revision of the draft that we'll be presenting tomorrow (February 8, 2024),” Fizer said. “We preserved the editing markups on that document so that there's a little bit more transparency into the evolution of that thought process and where we reflected that kind of input.” As it turned out, NEMSAC voted to approve changing this advisory’s status from Draft to Interim the next day.

Making Crash Scenes Safer for All

NEMSAC's Preparedness & Education Subcommittee is currently working on several proposals. One proposal shortened the name of their draft advisory from ‘Crash Scene Safety for Emergency Responders and Others On Scene’ to ‘Crash Scene Safety’, to be more inclusive. This was approved by NEMSAC at this meeting.

“We added an additional recommendation to what was existing, asking NHTSA to work collaboratively with the Federal Highway Administration to ensure that traffic incident management includes EMS as a stakeholder regarding updating traffic incident management,” noted Subcommittee Chair Lisa Basgall, Director of Rice University EMS in Houston. Her subcommittee is also working on advisories concerning workplace violence against EMS providers and the establishment of an EMS Injury Center.

Fixing EMS Funding

The quest to fix EMS funding remains a top priority for NEMSAC’s Sustainability & Efficiency Subcommittee. This being said, the subcommittee’s advisory on this issue was approved at NEMSAC’s November 2023 meeting, so that one can be removed,” said Subcommittee Chair Paul Brennan, Director of Pre-hospital Emergency Medical Services at Lawrence General Hospital in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

Other advisories on the subcommittee’s To-do list include “strategies for mobile integrated healthcare and community paramedicine funding and reimbursement,” Brennan said. “This remains in research status.” Another advisory, which is in the research stage, “is related to establishing pre-hospital physician practice reimbursement models for improved patient care and EMS physician oversight.”

Fixing Narcotics Administration Rules for Paramedics

The Integration & Technology Subcommittee is continuing its efforts to harmonize federal narcotics dosing rules as they apply to paramedics. To this end, “I'm actually helping to detail and streamline the DEA process,” said Subcommittee Chair Thomas Arkins, a paramedic with Indianapolis EMS. “We're hoping to bring that tomorrow to a final vote.” It was approved by NEMSAC the next day.

As well, “We've got the EMS Data Manager career pathway, which has been lovingly called the EMS Data Geeks Pathway, and as a fellow geek, I embrace that terminology,” Arkins said. “So we're hopefully going to move that one from draft to interim.” This move was approved by NEMSAC as well.

To learn more about NEMSAC and its activities, go to https://www.ems.gov/resources/national-ems-advisory-council-nemsac/.