dr-exmedic.com

Whew!  What a day!  It’s taken me a couple days to have a few minutes in front of the computer to really put my thoughts together regarding this event.

First of all, NAEMT considers the event a success–not a surprise, given that they thought they might be able to get 30-40 people to this, and ended up with 3 times that upper number.  I saw a pretty decent cross-section within that group:  people representing city, county, and private EMS agencies, some that were fire-based, some hospital-based, some independent.

Pennsylvania, I must say, had a decent showing:  9 of us.  (It should have been 15, but there were some last-minute cancellations.)  Notably absent (given their proximity) was anyone from Philadelphia, but at least we had a decent variety:  from big-city EMS (Pittsburgh) to smaller-city EMS (Allentown) to the suburbs (Ambler) to the more rural (Quakertown), plus the executive director of NAEMSE, and some dopey resident physician.

Monday was a quick evening briefing on what to expect and what to talk about (this year’s requests listed here, complete with links to the actual handouts we had).  Tuesday started later than I expected, with our first meeting at 9:30am.

Tuesday was a hectic whirlwind of a day.  As delegation leader, I ended up at all of the meetings I could get to, which meant hitting 6 of the 8 meetings, but I think half the delegation came to just as many meetings as I did.  It doesn’t sound like a lot of work to get to 6 meetings between 9:30 and 3pm, until you realize that few of them were in the same office building–which meant, say, leaving one of the House buildings south of the Capitol, walking past the Capitol to the Senate office building, taking out all the metal in our pockets to clear security, having the meeting, then heading back past the Capitol for another House meeting.  Nevertheless, we were only 2 minutes late to a single meeting, which I consider a victory.

The meetings varied a bit, though all were with staffers.  We did run into Sen. Robert Casey on his way to a caucus meeting, and he was gracious enough to pose for a picture with us.

The shortest meeting was about 10 minutes; once or twice, we had 30 minutes with the staffer.  We never really had to deal with anyone who seemed really resistant to our ideas, but it’s always tough to tell if anything useful will actually come out of these.  Of course, you have to try–if you don’t, someone else will happily bend the ears of our elected officials.