Celebrating 50 Years of EMS Week!

It’s been half a century since President Gerald Ford first authorized EMS Week in 1974 to celebrate EMS clinicians. Around the country, agencies, providers and communities have found myriad ways to honor this critical work over the years.

This year’s theme—"Honoring Our Past. Forging Our Future”—included celebrating changemakers like the founders of the Freedom House Ambulance Service in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Founded with a federal government grant in 1966, Freedom House Enterprises aimed to create training programs and job opportunities for African Americans living in the city’s Hill District. The organization went on to start an ambulance service in 1967; it became the first service in the United States to train clinicians at the paramedic level and consisted solely of African American men and women.

Even before the designation of EMS Week, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the home of the Office of EMS, has recognized and supported the tremendous impact prehospital care has had on improving community and public health. This is especially true when it comes to the role EMS plays in reducing the rate of death and serious injury from motor vehicle crashes on the nation’s streets and highways. Together with their colleagues in 911 communications, EMS professionals administer the post-crash care that so often makes the difference between life and death and between lasting disability and recovery.

Honoring our past also includes showing deference to the visionary leaders who brought the community together to develop the EMS Agenda for the Future (released in 1996) and appreciating the wisdom passed down to us from the many individuals who worked tirelessly throughout the last 50 years. Their hard-won experience has prompted next-generation innovations in patient care and enhanced the EMS systems in operation today.

And what does it mean to “forge our future”? It’s clear that the focus of NHTSA’s Office of EMS can’t waver from supporting the development of strong, data-driven EMS systems that can answer the call to help reduce the number of fatalities from roadside incidents. That means more than simply finding ways to continually improve the care we deliver. It means informed responses to get the right resource to the right place at the right time. It means a continued focus on EMS clinician education and retention, supporting individuals in this often challenging profession and the skilled use of data to measure and improve the quality of what we do.

To make a meaningful difference—to save more lives—there is one thing we must do above all else: collaborate. With each other, with 911, with highway safety leaders. With anyone and everyone with whom we share the goal of keeping more Americans safe and healthy.

What does that collaboration look like? Continuing to support data collection and aggregation in the National EMS Information System (NEMSIS) and sharing this data with other professions. Reaching out to your state Highway Safety Office to ask whether your state’s Triennial Highway Safety Plan includes post-crash care. Talking to local 911 centers to encourage the training of more telecommunicators in Emergency Medical Dispatch 911 protocols and securing funding to measure performance for continuous quality improvement. These are all examples of how to develop people-centered systems, fulfilling the goals identified in EMS Agenda 2050.

If you work in EMS, we hope you were able to take advantage of the resources at emsweek.org and that you celebrated your work and that of your colleagues and let your community know what you do every day. And if you aren’t an EMS professional, we hope you took a minute to thank one. They are the living embodiment of our profession’s vision and commitment to people-centered care.

EMS Week was presented by the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) in partnership with the National Association of Emergency Medical Technicians (NAEMT).