EMS organizations around the country are facing the same pressures. Chronic underfunding, staffing challenges, a lack of community recognition and a lack of leadership training and support.

In several places around the country long-standing EMS contracts have been terminated, others sent out to RFP, and a few organizations have been disbanded or stripped of their service areas which were handed over to neighboring organizations – sometimes without warning.

The two common themes that ran through many of these cases were either politics or, more commonly, the fact that the EMS agency was seen as a commodity and not a valuable community resource and partner. Changing political winds are hard to fight, but when the EMS agency does little to make their everyday actions known they become easy targets.

Your choice, starting today, is either to begin telling your story and showing how valuable and remarkable the work that you’re doing is, or continue to rely on the outdated and dangerous path making you easy to replace which is “we don’t need to promote ourselves, they call 9-1-1 and we come, what’s to tell?”

Being remarkable is not hard. You do good work. You have good response times. Your team is professional and compassionate. NO ONE KNOWS THAT.

You must consistently and clearly tell your story. You have to be seen, not just on responses, but at school events, interacting with kids, seniors, and helping with charity events.

Part of being remarkable is being understood. Tell your community what you do, in terms that they understand. Explaining the services that you provide. Looking for ways to help.

An agency that I had the privilege of running for a few years participated in everything. We had units at church fairs, charity walkathons and school fairs taking blood pressures and handing out vials of life, getting to talk with the people we served. We taught first aid and CPR and always had a CPR station set up in an ambulance. It helped to recruit some people but also showed them how we did our work as they replicated it for their certification.

We collaborated with the community health agency and set up one of our ambulances as a mobile vaccination clinic. We even sent medics into a third-grade class and let the kids get hooked up to the monitor to put a six second strip (picture of their heart) into a valentine’s day card for their mothers. We were remarkable.

Our contracts were renewed, we got funding, we had people wanting to work for us all because we did the work…and told the world about it…consistently.

So again, you have a choice, do you want to be remarkable or replaceable?

No sure how to get started? Get in touch.