Inside TeamHealth’s EMS Leaders Committee
Strong partnerships between emergency medicine clinicians and EMS professionals are essential to delivering exceptional patient care. Through the EMS Leaders Committee, TeamHealth is strengthening those relationships by fostering collaboration, recognizing excellence, and supporting local engagement across the country. We spoke with three committee leaders to learn more about the committee’s history, its vision for the future, and why investing in EMS partnerships continues to make a meaningful difference for clinicians, patients, and communities.
Dr. Randal Dabbs, Co-Founder and President, Practice Development
Why are the relationships between emergency medicine clinicians and EMS professionals so important, and how is the EMS Leaders Committee working to strengthen those partnerships for the future?
EMS is an important cog in the wheel of emergency medicine, the first cog. The TeamHealth EMS Leaders Committee is composed of emergency medicine leaders whose goal is to create and share best practices that focus and foster critical EMS/emergency clinician partnership. The committee acknowledges and appreciates the immense pressures and challenges our EMS colleagues encounter every day when managing their patients under the most difficult situations. Our goal is to find new and innovative methods to embrace future generations of our EMS colleagues.
Dr. Adam Darnobid, Facility Medical Director, EMS Leaders Committee Chair
As chair of the EMS Leaders Committee, what are the committee’s goals and focus areas this year?
For the rest of this year and into the future, our goal is to share national best practices with our FMDs across the country in a useful and actionable way. EMS is a diverse practice with unique geographic challenges faced by each site. By engaging experts with diverse experiences and perspectives, we can deliver tested solutions and practices that help us deliver exceptional care to our communities. We also aim to advance our understanding of leading clinical practices through discussions of these initiatives and by sharing successes across our sites.
How is TeamHealth supporting those goals? Can you tell us about the new EMS Recognition Pin Program and what you hope it accomplishes?
Connection, recognition, and communication are fundamental to building relationships with our communities with the professionals delivering care outside of the emergency department. Building off the success of our company-wide Clinician Pin Recogntion Program, we created a recognition of the hard work our prehospital professionals do every day. This pin program is one example of adapting a successful program from elsewhere within TeamHealth to support the broader healthcare community.
TeamHealth has the breadth and depth of support to help us with expertise, guidance, and the resources to help the EMS committee move at a rapid pace!
What are you most looking forward to this year, and what would you say to facility medical directors who are interested in getting involved with the committee?
For the coming year, we are continuously finding experienced and enthusiastic EMS professionals who can share their unique experiences and expertise with us. The degree of talent which staffs our facilities across the country is staggering.
For any FMD, AFMD, or lead APC, or interested physician, please reach out to me or Erika East. An email would start the connection and help me reach out to you and begin our journey towards better EMS across the country!
Dr. Patrick Cody, Assistant Medical Director, EMS Leaders Committee Member
What inspired you to become involved with the EMS Leaders Committee, and why is being a member meaningful to you?
It can be very easy to feel like you are living and working on an island. It’s helpful to know that others share your struggles, and it’s nice to be able to talk to people who may have solved the same problems you’re dealing with now. Having a safe space to share ideas, talk shop an solve problems is priceless.
How has serving on the committee influenced the way you engage with EMS agencies in your own community?
One of the committee’s priorities is strengthening relationships between TeamHealth emergency departments and local EMS services. We want to be the emergency care providers of choice for EMS professionals when they are making destination decisions for their patients. I also had the opportunity to conduct a study examining paramedic attitudes toward destination decision-making, and the findings reinforced what we had anticipated: paramedics want to be treated as part of the care team, not demeaned for bringing patients to an emergency department, and they want to know they can trust the care their patients will receive. It has been valuable to explore these findings at the local level, and our next step is to work with emergency departments in my area to turn those insights into meaningful change.
What would you tell another TeamHealth clinician about the value of participating in the committee or investing in strong relationships with local EMS teams?
Strong relationships with EMS providers benefit everyone, especially our patients. When EMS professionals can rely on us to provide exceptional care, and we can rely on them to provide excellent care during transport, we are better positioned to work together as a team. Ultimately, we should all strive to be the emergency care provider EMS professionals choose when deciding where to bring their patients. Recently, a flight crew member told me he enjoyed bringing patients to our emergency department because we were always welcoming and he knew we would take great care of the people he brought to us. I think that sentiment captures exactly what we should strive for in our relationships with EMS – to be trusted partners who consistently deliver exceptional care.
