EMS World Expo Includes Award for Big Easy's Department
The New Orleans EMS received the 2012 Dick Ferneau Paid EMS Service of the Year Award at last week’s conference.
The 2012 EMS World Expo wrapped up Nov. 2 at the Morial Convention Center in downtown New Orleans, with attendees discussing some of the very issues that emergency services personnel in New York City, New Jersey, and several other eastern states were confronting as they coped with the flooding, fires, and outages spawned by Hurricane Sandy.
The Oct. 29-Nov. 2 event included sessions focused on sudden cardiac arrest, the NFPA 1917 standard for automotive ambulances, pre-hospital care for morbidly obese patients, ballistic trauma care, how to integrate smartphones and tablets into EMS education, provider suicides, safety culture, ensuring injury-free performance, "bath salts" drug abuse cases, international EMS operations, and a host of other EMS topics. The conference was presented by Cygnus Expositions in partnership with the National Association of Emergency Medical Technicians and was linked to the inaugural World Trauma Symposium on Nov. 1.
The 2013 edition of the NFPA 1917 standard contains significant new requirements for ambulances, including a 171-pound load capacity per seat and carbon monoxide detector requirement for all gas-powered vehicles, according to a JEMS article available at http://www.jems.com/article/ems-insider/sneak-peek-nfpa-1917.
On Oct. 31, the city of New Orleans' Emergency Medical Services received the 2012 Dick Ferneau Paid EMS Service of the Year Award at the conference. City officials said this annual award is given to an EMS service that not only excels in outstanding patient care, but also embraces the latest science in pre-hospital medicine, community education, and has capabilities such as swift water rescue, urban search and rescue medics, and bicycle medics.
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu spoke at the conference. Next year's EMS World Expo will take place Sept. 9-13 in Las Vegas.