EMS Safety

Service Description

Teaches students how to protect themselves and their patients while on the job. It promotes a culture of safety and helps reduce the number of on-the-job fatalities and injuries. EMS Safety is the only national, comprehensive safety course for EMS practitioners. Its interactive format features real- life case studies and compelling discussions on current safety issues, and provides students with a forum to share their own experiences. Course activities allow students to apply critical thinking and best safety practices to EMS scenarios. Students are taught to • Identify and manage the hazards that can appear during daily tasks, from offensive drivers to violent encounters to chronic stress. • Describe and apply the principles of crew resource management in EMS. • Apply techniques to maintain safe vehicle operations. • List and assess strategies to apply in the field that improve patient safety. • Identify strategies to ensure practitioner safety. • Strengthen resilience skills and focus on personal health to combat both chronic and critical incident stress. Topics covered include: • How safety impacts patients and practitioners, from maintaining a culture of safety in changing situations to communication and documentation strategies. • Crew resource management in EMS, modeling effective communication, maintaining situational awareness, and a being an effective member of a team. • Emergency vehicle safety including maintenance and inspection considerations, responsibilities of due regard, defensive driving techniques, and common causes of vehicle collisions and strategies to avoid them. • Safety in the roadway, including multi-agency pre-planning, vehicle and practitioner visibility techniques, and defensive staging practices. • Patient safety, strategies to identify and prevent common patient errors, just culture, and safe handling techniques for all patients. • Practitioner safety, situational awareness, and verbal, physical, and chemical techniques to deescalate potential threats. • Injury and infection prevention and control. • Practitioner personal health, resilience skills, and ensuring personal readiness for the daily challenges and hazards of working in the field.