The reality show pilot that we made never got a second episode, Learning Channel and A&E were afraid of newly minted patient privacy laws and passed on the show. Luckily for EMS as a whole they eventually actually read the legislation and realized they could put EMS shows back on TV.
Behind the scenes was so much fun with Mark, Ted and Chris I wanted to update the YouTube channel so you can relive the Chronicles of EMS in chronological order as well as with better notes and links to other videos.
We were just a couple of guys hungry for answers and I'd like to think we got them.
have a scroll through the videos all the way from the night before Mark's arrival:
All the way through our behind the scenes videos, my adventures in the UK which didn't make the pilot episode (again, they were afraid of social media) then catch the Pilot Episode of Chronicles of EMS (Later named Beyond the Lights & Sirens) link at the end of our "The End" video.
If you followed us back then and helped make social media relevant in EMS, thank you!
If you have no idea what I'm talking about, have never heard of #CoEMS or the Project, sit back and watch what it was like to explain the importance of social media to an EMS culture that feared it. That and watch me fumble with a tiny iPhone 1gen. That and Mark talks funny.
What are your memories from CoEMS? Share in the comments here or on each video!
Cheers!
Comments
In both countries, ambulances started out the same way. Until the 1970s, UK ambulances were run by a hodgepodge of local governments, hospitals and charities. The government sought to cut costs and pool resources by merging ambulances into county-level agencies, and later into regional agencies. Mark worked for NEAS, which serves a population of 2.5 million and now is one of the country's *smallest* ambulance services. Fire brigades and police forces have also been merged, but they're still mostly run on a county level rather than a regional level.
Whereas in the US, with its tradition of very decentralised government, it doesn't seem as though there was ever a push to regionalise the ambulances. They've remained in the hands of local governments, and tended to get absorbed by the fire service.
There is now some movement to getting the firefighters to co-respond to medical emergencies, to ease pressure off the ambulance service. Mostly it's to do basic but time-critical tasks like bringing a defib to a cardiac arrest. Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service, my local fire brigade, has been by far one of the keenest. Mostly it's the on-call firefighters rather than the full-time ones, and they use small response cars rather than fire engines. It's not just firefighters who are doing this, either. There's a network of volunteers called the Community First Responders who also provide these kinds of response.
Mostly it seems the challenges ambulance services face in both countries are the same: rising demand and difficulties getting the funding and resources to deal with it. Population ageing is the main cause of the former, but there's other factors too. Non-emergency calls have rocketed. A retired paramedic I know told me that in the 1970s, every 999 call was a full-on emergency. Nowadays, even with a non-emergency advice number (111) in place, paramedics are frequently being called out to things that would be better dealt with by other parts of the health service, a drive to A&E or by social workers.
Indeed the idea of "Co-response" with the Brigades was a sour topic when I was in the UK in 2009. The Pathways dispatch program in the NEAS was a fascinating concept I hoped to bring back to the US, but our bosses here told us "What, and lose a billable contact?" and I knew I had to wait for a new administration.
Cheers!
HM