Inside EMS

In this week’s episode of Inside EMS, co-host Chris Cebollero and I discuss the difficulty San Francisco FD is having meeting EMS response time standards. The FD crunched the numbers, said they needed 42 more paramedics, and the city gave them only 16. Unsurprisingly, they’re still having difficulty making their response time standards, and now the city is turning to ...

In this week’s episode of Inside EMS, it’s all about the Benjamins. Co-host Chris Cebollero and I discuss Rural Metro’s decision to close most of its Indiana operations, laying off 361 EMTs in the process, a Virginia county’s program to cover ambulance co-pays for its residents, and a Missouri petition to halt outsourcing of ambulance billing. In our Clinical Issue, ...

Question: If a medical study were done in your city, comparing traditional medical treatment vs a placebo, would you consent to being a study subject? If you declined, would it change your mind if you knew that you’d only be enrolled in the study if your heart stopped beating, that the traditional medical treatment to restart it fails 93% of ...

For you EMS types, co-host Chris Cebollero and I revisit a hot topic in EMS, namely, whether ambulance crews should be allowed to carry concealed (or unconcealed) firearms. The topic always generates a great deal of heated debate from both sides, and it was brought back into the public’s eye with the recent thwarted mass-shooting at Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital near ...

And more importantly, why do we need their weekend-long merit badge courses to put the stamp of legitimacy on two years of EMS education? Co-host Chris Cebollero and I discuss the latest EMS news and events, and debate whether clinical standards should be the sole province of one organization, and whether those card courses serve to advance EMS care, or ...

For you EMS types, in this week’s episode of Inside EMS, co-host Chris Cebollero and I discuss the latest EMS news, and address the eternal question: Why is dispatch so mean to us? For our Guest table segment, we also interview Mike Miller, EMS Program Coordinator of Creighton University, the guy responsible for administering that bridge program that allows qualified ...

On this episode of Inside EMS, co-host Chris Cebollero and I discuss the often contentious relationship between EMS and nursing, and the news item that brought the conversation to a head; Creighton University’s 2-week RN to Paramedic bridge program. Can an experienced ED or ICU RN learn what it takes to become a paramedic in two weeks? Not by a ...

In this week’s episode of Inside EMS, co-host Chris Cebollero and I discuss the relationship between professionalism and perception in EMS. Does being inked and pierced invoke a negative perception among our patients? What does the state of your uniform say about you as an EMT? Short answer: it depends. We’d all love to believe that we should be judged ...

That’s this week’s clinical topic on the Inside EMS podcast. Co-host Chris Cebollero says street experience is the glue that binds all the disparate knowledge and skills together to make a competent paramedic. I’ve written about this before. Go read that, and come back. I say experience is one of the most overrated buzzwords in EMS. It’s arbitrary and random, ...

Special treat for you on this week’s episode of Inside EMS: Co-host Chris Cebollero and I square off against our sister podcast, those hose monkeys hydrant humpers smoke eaters knuckle draggers professional firefighters** over at The Command Post. Our topic: is fire-based EMS really a viable system model, compared to private or municipal third service? My position on this has ...

… Episode 11 is up on the Inside EMS podcast on EMS1. Co-host Chris Cebollero and I cover the latest EMS news and events, and go to war over helicopter vs ground-based EMS before we welcome Ben Chlapek to the Guest Table. Ben is a paramedic, fire chief and retired Lt. Colonel in the US Army, and has been doing ...

… Episode 10 of the Inside EMS podcast is available on EMS1, our RSS feed, and iTunes. Last week we taped a portion of the podcast on location at the Connecticut EMS Expo, and we had the opportunity to talk with a handful of attendees on our topic this week: Is volunteerism good for the future of EMS? My take ...

Episode 9 of the Inside EMS podcast with myself and Chris Cebollero is available for your listening pleasure. Give us a listen as Chris and I talk about the Field EMS Bill, and argue over the efficacy of ALS in prehospital care. At the Guest Table is Don Lundy, NAEMT President who talks about EMS advocacy and the implications of ...

The Girlfriend and I are away from the Little Cottage In The Woods for the weekend, attending/speaking at the CT EMS Expo. This is my eighth time speaking in Connecticut; third time at their state conference, a couple of symposiums for the nice folks in Sharon, and three seminars for the guys at Emergency Resource Management. Let’s just say that ...

Okay, EMS folks. I need your support. Chris Cebollero and I have been doing a podcast for the past seven weeks, and it has a great deal of potential. Our listener base has been slowly growing, but we need to break 1000 weekly listeners for this to be a sustainable thing. We’re about 250 regular listeners from that goal now. ...