Emergency Medical Services is a passion that I stumbled into almost by accident. Despite my somewhat aimless decision to join Montgomery Township's volunteer EMS (MEMS), when I started taking the EMT class and going on calls I found a very deep satisfaction. EMS is a field where your actions can have an immediate positive impact on others, with noticiable results, whether simply providing peace of mind or actually resuscitating someone in cardiac arrest.
Nearly 8 years later, I am as invested in EMS as ever. During my undergraduate career at the University of Delaware, I was a member of the award-winning Emergency Care Unit (UDECU) for four years, serving as Co-Coordinator (the equivalent of Ambulance Lieutenant) for two years. In 2005, I was part of the four-person team that won 1st place in the NCEMSF skills competition.
Since starting law school, I have been a member of GW's Emergency Response Group (EMeRG), serving as Public Relations Supervisor for '06-'07. EMeRG also has many awards to their name, though I'm most personally proud of the 2008 NCEMSF Website of the Year Award. I have also maintained a National Registry certification since March 2002; have been a CPR Instructor since 2003; published a paper on liability for EMTs, and presented a lecture at the 2007 NCEMSF Conference.
In 2002, the University of Delaware Emergency Care Unit was awarded the highest national honor a volunteer Basic Life Support (BLS) service can recieve - the National Association of EMT's Leo R. Schwartz award. UDECU was only the second campus-based organization to recieve this award, and the first since 1988 (when it was awarded to Virginia Tech Rescue Squad). Unfortunately, it seems NAEMT has removed the listing of past winners for all of their awards.
Over the summer of 2007, I designed and built a new website for EMeRG around modifications to open-source resources. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any screenshots of the old website, but it was essentially a Web 1.0 site, for those who know what that means. The goal of the new site was to substantially improve the aesthetic while also making it easier to navigate. The site was named Website of the Year at the 2008 NCEMSF Conference.
In 2006, I wrote an article titled "Liability for EMS Field Providers" that provided an overview of various statutory immunity schemes used in several states. It was published in the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology's Legal Medicine Journal in September of 2006.
I then adapted the material for a presentation at the 2007 National Collegiate EMS Foundation conference in Baltimore, MD, suggesting that as a policy matter, the laws seem to be designed to encourage review and learning, and that therefore a failure to review and learn from past mistakes may eventually create a situation where providers would not enjoy immunity from civil liability.
