Celebration Time: Expo in October, EMS Week Now

It’s May already! You know what that means? We are only five months away from October’s EMS World Expo. We have assembled yet another extraordinary educational, informational, and networking experience for you. It’s not too early to begin planning your visit to New Orleans, October 14–18, to share this experience with more than 6,500 of your colleagues and 350 exhibitors. 

Visit emsworldexpo.com to take advantage of early registration discounts, sign up for preconference workshops before they sell out, and book your travel using our hotel and airfare discounts. (Note: Please don’t be taken by unauthorized housing companies—only book your hotel through our website.) You can view the full agenda on the site, including special events like New Orleans EMS ride-along opportunities, the Data and Technology Summit, the EMS World Clinical Challenge, and Special Focus tracks in rural EMS and event medicine.

To help you get in the EMS World Expo spirit, we have included the 2019 EMS World Expo Attendee Guide with this month’s magazine. Once you devour the hundreds of hours of sessions, take some time to engage in the activities of EMS Week, taking place this year from May 19–25. 

We asked, and you answered, sending in amazing stories of those who went “beyond the call”; check out the content this month to be inspired by the valuable contributions of your EMS peers. The American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) and National Association of Emergency Medical Technicians (NAEMT) continue, through this decades-long recognition, to show off the impressive work EMS professionals perform every day in communities around the country. 

Need ideas for how you and your agency can help with these efforts? Check out ACEP’s EMS Week website (www.acep.org/emsweek) for a how-to guide with suggestions to coordinate with stakeholders, celebrate your own providers, and engage the community with important training like the Bystander Training CPR and Stop the Bleed Challenge (www.acep.org/administration/ems-resources/emsweek/cpr-challenge/).

After another long shift, it may be easy to sit back as an observer and watch EMS news from afar, but motivating yourself to participate will bring you well-deserved personal and emotional rewards. Organize a community event, find a way to highlight the outstanding work of an agency or provider, or just take the time to say thanks to your peers. We sometimes focus on problems instead of successes, but all humans ultimately desire feedback for the hard work they do. We can all agree that few deserve praise more than EMS providers.

Joshua D. Hartman, MBA, NRP, is senior vice president of the Cardiovascular and Public Safety divisions at HMP, the parent company of EMS World. 

Hilary Gates, MAEd, NRP, is senior editorial and program director for EMS World.