Resident Eagle: In-Person Again—A Report From Florida

Resident Eagle is a monthly column profiling the work of top EMS physicians and medical directors from the Metropolitan EMS Medical Directors Global Alliance (the "Eagles"), who represent America’s largest and key international cities. For information on the Gathering of Eagles 2022, see useagles.org.

The under-the-lights high school baseball championship game is in full swing. It’s the top of the seventh, the score is tied, and the bases are loaded. The pitcher begins his windup. Suddenly there is a crack of thunder, a flash of lightning, and everything goes dark.

Moments later, as lights come back up, several players are down on the field, some not moving. Within minutes a team of paramedics enters the field, sets up triage, and begins treating the injured. There are five patients, including one in cardiac arrest, another with severe chest and hand burns, and a third seizing.

Additional units arrive, quickly treating and transporting the most seriously injured to the alerted and prepared local hospital, where a team of emergency nurses and attending staff springs into action to provide lifesaving definitive therapy.

This was not TV but a scene from the opening day of the First There First Care-Gathering of Eagles Conference (FTFC-GOE), held in June at the Hard Rock Hotel Resort and Casino in Hollywood, Fla.

The five-day conference opened on June 14 with the Florida Resuscitation Academy and perennially popular ALS and emergency nursing competitions. It closed June 17–18 with the world-acclaimed, content-packed EMS State of the Science: Gathering of Eagles conference.

The weeklong FTFC-GOE event featured a trade show with than 50 vendors offering the latest in prehospital and emergency department concepts and equipment as well as preconference mini-sessions, progressive wellness initiatives, welcoming receptions, and available EMS and nursing CEUs (plus Category I medical CME for physicians).

This year’s programs were offered both in-person and virtually, allowing attendees to participate in the entire program or select portions. All CDC guidelines as well as Broward County’s safety protocols were observed and monitored at the event.

Packing Up for Florida

With no in-person gathering in 2020, this was the Eagles’ first year in Florida. Their annual meeting featured nearly 100 individual plenary talks over two days from the world’s leading medical directors. The Eagles team consists primarily of jurisdictional metropolitan EMS medical directors for 50 of the nation’s largest cities and their counterparts in the U.K., Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and other nations, as well as the medical officers from pivotal federal agencies and the leadership of major societies such as ACEP, NAEMSP, and medical directors from NASEMSO.

What makes the gathering compelling is that attendees do not know what topics the 100 talks will cover until they arrive at the venue on the morning of the first session. This tradition of the undisclosed agenda reflects that the information is always fresh, real-time, and cutting-edge. 

Read about more from this year’s show in coming issues. For more see www.firsttherefirstcare.com and https://useagles.org/. 

Paul E. Pepe, MD, MPH, is coordinator of the Metropolitan EMS Medical Directors (aka “Eagles”) Global Alliance, Dallas, Tex.

Sidebar: Putting Information Into Action

As much as any EMS conference, the Gathering of Eagles draws a diverse audience. Its attendees range from accomplished senior physicians to brand-new EMT-Bs. Delivering presentations from which everyone can benefit—especially in the Eagles’ rapid-fire, boiled-down time windows—requires real communication skills. 

One of the consortium’s newer members, Columbus Fire medical director Robert Lowe, MD, FACEP, FAEMS, brings a unique background to that task. He began his career in aerospace engineering, working for General Dynamics and Rockwell as a control and propulsion instructor for space flight training at Johnson Space Center in Houston. He was the lead control/prop instructor for Endeavour shuttle missions in 1993 (to repair the Hubble telescope) and 1995. 

“In layman’s terms, I trained astronauts to fly the shuttle,” Lowe says. “As you work your way up as an instructor, you’re assigned crews you have for about nine months and train them on its basic aspects. We covered all the systems: control and propulsion and anything that had to do with flight techniques, flight surfaces, flight controls, and all the engines. It was a great job—I loved it.” 

Lowe’s interest in medicine developed after college and began with time volunteering first at a hospital, then a suburban Texas EMS service. That ultimately led to medical school at Texas Tech and a successful turn into a second career in medicine and EMS. 

The first offers some advantages to the second, Lowe says. 

“Looking back, I think one of the nice translations to this job was in technically understanding content and then communicating it to people with different technical backgrounds,” he says. “While we had many astronauts who were pilots and military pilots, we also had astronauts who were very smart individuals but from other backgrounds—material science, electrical engineering, all kinds of things. So learning the teaching and making people operationally functional, I think that carried over well.” 

At least when you’re teaching, the engineering world, like the medical world, involves both technical and human elements—left- and right-brain strengths. Converting dense technical information into digestible words engagingly delivered requires both and is a common challenge. 

The other concept that dovetailed into emergency medicine was critical processing—“the need to triage information and actions,” says Lowe. “We teach flight crews to process information—what needs to be taken care of right now, what can wait, and how you prioritize these multiple competing objectives. That obviously translates into EMS.” 

—John Erich, Senior Editor