40 Years On, Urban Chiefs Gather to Examine Major-Incident Preparedness

An online EMS Magazine report, from October 20, 2006, outlines a meeting in which urban EMS leaders from across the nation gathered in D.C. to improve their ability to respond to large-scale incidents.

Source: www.emsresponder.com

It was 40 years ago that the National Academy of Sciences issued its seminal "white paper" and set in motion the development of modern American EMS. Now, for the first time since, top officials representing systems in the U.S.'s largest cities have come together to examine what hampers their ability to respond to large-scale incidents--and figure out what to do about it.

Operations chiefs, officers, directors and administrators from 49 big-city systems summited in Washington, DC, on October 16--17 as part of the National EMS Preparedness Initiative, a federally funded effort to identify and develop solutions for impediments to EMS readiness for major disasters and attacks. They worked in interactive groups in an environment organizers strove to keep free of outside pressures, and despite coming from an array of provider models--fire-based, third service and private--they quickly reached common ground on key barriers and potential steps toward resolving them.

"We've never had a forum where leaders of big-city systems could connect like this--that's one of the greatest things to come out of it," says Gregg Lord, coinvestigator and Associate Director of EMS Policy for the project. "We utilized an interactive voting technology that allowed the attendees to drive the issues, solutions and strategies they felt were important. They had the freedom to do and say whatever they wanted, and they arrived at a lot of consensus over what the issues were and what the solutions might be."

The Homeland Security Policy Institute at The George Washington University, which is conducting the project, will be releasing the outcomes of the summit after they've been delivered to the Department of Homeland Security, which is funding the two-year effort. Meanwhile, a second summit is planned for spring 2007. This one will widen scope to include constituency organizations and federal officials involved in EMS regulation and activities. Recommendations for improving EMS response to large-scale incidents will be made to DHS based upon the output of the summit attendees.

For more, see www.nationalemspreparedness.org .

Article originally appeared in the EMSResponder.com's This Week in EMS, Week Ending Oct. 20, 2006.
By HEATHER CASPI, EMSResonder.com, Editor