Safety of EMS providers as well as patients has been identified by a number of organizations recently as a high priority.
Those recommendations have resulted in the announcement of a $500,000 NHTSA discretionary safety grant for a National EMS "Culture of Safety" Conference and the development of a national strategy.
The closing date for submitting a proposal is June 17.
In addition to the conference, a steering committee of stakeholders will be established and a national strategy on safety will be developed and disseminated.
The National EMS Advisory Committee and FICEMS are among the groups that have long considered safety an overlooked issue. They have stressed the need for a national focus.
In addition to input garnered at the national conference, a series of meetings will be held in the Washington, D.C. area to develop the strategy, according to the grant announcement.
"All drafts will also be available for broader EMS community input throughout the process and this effort will culminate with a larger national review meeting in the Washington, D.C. area prior to the Grantee submitting the final version to NHTSA.
"As a final step before submitting the final draft Strategy to NHTSA for approval, the Grantee will ensure that NEMSAC, and particularly their Oversight, Analysis and Research (OAR) and Safety committees, has an opportunity to review the suggested strategies so they can make further recommendations."
Among the agencies suggested for participation on the 15-member steering committee are NAEMT, IAFC, IAFF, ACEP, NEMSAC, NFPA and NVFC as well as a number of physician, nursing and education organizations.
The document also points to the importance of the project. "Emergency Medical Services (EMS) has been identified as a high-risk industry with injuries and deaths among both EMS personnel and the public. EMS personnel are routinely exposed to factors that threaten their personal safety and this, in turn, can impact the safety of the patients they serve."
"There is also evidence that suggests one of the biggest risk factors for EMS personnel are combative patients and bystanders whom they encounter in the field. Moreover, there are times when a patient's safety is negatively impacted by the inadvertent actions taken by EMS personnel while providing care for the patient. Regardless of how EMS personnel or the patients they serve are harmed, the public, government and EMS industry have a duty to identify these threats and find ways to remove and reduce the harmful impact."
Errors in medicine are not a new topic, either. Authors of the grant announcement noted that an IOM report, "To Err is Human," was issued in 1999.
"Now, ten years after the report, some solutions are making their way through the health care system. It is not yet clear, however, that these principles have been widely adopted and ingrained by the EMS Community. The principles that create a safer environment -- particularly, leadership that creates and fosters an environment without fear of admitting and learning from mistakes -- are not absent from the community but have not been broadly adopted."
"The lack of a comprehensive EMS injury data system, capable of collecting, cataloging and reporting standardized EMS crash and non-crash related injury data, severely limits the EMS industry's ability to develop, test and implement mitigation strategies to protect EMS personnel. The task of identifying injury causative factors becomes far too speculative without timely, accurate, complete, integrated and accessible data that includes location, cause, contributing factors, and related activities associated with injuries involving EMS personnel."
