EMS World

JUN 2015

EMS World Magazine is the most authoritative source in the world for clinical and educational material designed to improve the delivery of prehospital emergency medical care.

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REFERENCES 1. Aran Levasseur. Teaching Innovation Is About More Than iPads in the Classroom. Media Shift, www.pbs.org/ mediashift/2012/07/teaching-innovation-is-about-more- than-ipads-in-the-classroom198/. 2. Chuck Karayan. The Problem with Continuing Education. American Surveyor, www. amerisurv.com/PDF/ TheAmericanSurveyor_ KarayanTheProblemWithContinuingEducation_ May2005.pdf. are pertinent to their everyday practice, things that are coming six months from now. "What are the big changes? What do I have to prepare for?" So doing a valid needs assessment, having an active program committee and medical director, and, for us, seeing the documentation of how those pieces inter- act and develop an educational agenda, and how that's presented to the EMS pro- viders, and then the way they get a chance to evaluate that—those are the things that are most often missing. The description of how all those pieces fit together should provide for EMS providers a valid, relevant continuing education agenda. What goes into a good needs assessment? What sort of things should a provider look at? There are many ways to do it; I don't think there's any one gold standard. However, personally I think a needs assessment real- ly ought to be based on call volume and quality improvement initiatives. If an EMS provider has done really well with their management of STEMI and STEMI's a large part of their call volume, do we really need to focus on STEMI? Maybe we should focus more on the things that provider sees less of. For instance, I haven't done a live deliv- ery in probably eight years, so maybe in my continuing education program it would be appropriate to spend some time prac- ticing and studying up on live deliveries, in case I have to face that in the field. A real needs assessment looks at the system as a whole, based on call volume and call trends, but also what the indi- vidual is doing. How has the individual responded to their particular calls, and how should their service match up the educational agenda for that individual? The time has passed where we just say, "This month we're going to cover traction splinting." That's not good enough. We should be covering what the individual needs to see, based on what they haven't done recently. What was the purpose of putting together the best practices document? As we've seen this dramatic shift in the technological abilities of continuing edu- cation providers, we thought in order to really improve the applications for accredi- tation, and ultimately the provision of con- tinuing education, we should detail some of the best practices we've seen. These are areas where some CE providers really stand out above the rest. You outline some of these new technologies in the paper; what's new and exciting? Some of them are really amazing. There's one provider who has a three-dimensional platform using a smartphone where you can practice skills on your phone at any time. You can be sitting in your ambulance at 3 in the afternoon and practice pleural needle decompression. And it's really not that expensive. You also mention new training for reviewers to go along with that. What will that entail? Where we have reviewers who haven't nec- essarily seen all these recent technological changes, we'll need to get them up to speed. We've also seen a couple of unfor- tunate instances where some continuing education providers have used educational products from other CE providers. That doesn't happen often, but there have been three cases in the last 12 months. For our reviewers to be able to recog- nize works that aren't original, that maybe need to be flagged, that's a big push for us. We've written a document to help them recognize things that aren't original early in the application process. We're training them to look through the whole reference list, to be sure they go back and do a Google scholar search to make sure the references match up with the content, the objectives match the content and ref- erences, and so on. It's really kind of putting all the puzzle pieces together. So when we look at a particular offering, we're looking at the objectives, we're looking at the needs assessment that led to that set of objec- tives, we're looking at how the program committee put that list of objectives together based on the needs assessment and the input of the medical director, and we're looking at the content to see that it's all relevant and matches the needs assessment and the objectives. And then we're looking at how it's referenced—that people are using peer-reviewed journals and current textbooks and textbook chapters from well-known authors written within the last couple of years. That's a lot different from looking at an offering on, say, management of chest trauma and seeing the author cited a sole textbook that was the Brady paramedic manual from 1990. EMS has evolved a lot since 1990! You and the chair of CECBEMS' board, Dr. Juan March, are speaking at EMS World Expo. What will you be addressing? I'll be doing a lecture about CECBEMS, the accreditation process, how it came about, what we look for and how it all improves the educational activity. Dr. March will talk specifically about the best practices document. The CECBEMS Board of Directors includes Juan A. March, MD, FACEP, chair; Robert A. Loftus, BS, NREMT-B, vice chair; Sean Trask, MPA, EMT-P, secretary-treasurer; Richard Beebe, MS, RN, NREMT-P; Stephanie Davis, DO, FACEP; Andy Gienapp, MS, NREMT-P; Joe Holley, MD, FACEP; Gabriel Romero, MBA, NREMT-P; Robert Wales, BS, CCEMT-P, NREMT-P; Elizabeth Sibley, former executive director; and Jay M. Scott, BS, NREMT-P, executive director. Contact CECBEMS at 972/247-4442; jscott@cecbems. org; http://cecbems.org. EMSWORLD.com | JUNE 2015 31

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