Or maybe a bad penny, I can’t escape the National Association of Emergency Medical Technicians. Back in July I said Goodbye to NAEMT in which I laid out my reasons for pocketing my $40.00 and not renewing my membership. Which lapsed back in July.
So, today in the mail comes the fall edition of the four times a year (I think it used to be more) NAEMT newsletter. Which is a glossy publication that tells us how wonderful the NAEMT is. “From The President” is on page five. I’ll quote only a small part of it, but it’s illustrative of the problem we have in EMS.
“Our strategic plan calls upon us to “exercise greater leadership in unifying the EMS industry through collaboration.”
Here we have people all over EMS trying to get us recognized as a profession and this putz is telling every member of NAEMT and everyone else that the premier (their position, not mine) representative organization for EMTs considers EMS an industry. You know, like making light bulbs or something.
A bit further on he goes on to list some of the “partners” that the board of the NAEMT will be meeting with in a couple of weeks. Not listed is the International Association of EMS Chiefs, International Association of EMTs and Paramedics, or even the EMS Labor Alliance. It’s possible that they are invited, maybe it’s even likely, and they just weren’t included on the list for space reasons. If one of my readers knows the answer or has complete list of invitees for the collaboration, I’d greatly appreciate it if they’d let me know. Probably just coincidence that they included two organizations that represent the fire service.
I don’t expect much from this collaboration because it’s just the same organizations that have been competing, each claiming to represent the best interests of EMS, for years and years. Not to mention that some of these competing organizations have members on each others boards and committees. A touch to incestuous for my liking. Just a microcosm of why we can’t get any respect from the medical community or the public safety community. Or anyone else for that matter.
My trial membership with the NAEMT is about to expire, but if I upgrade now, I get a free T-shirt.Seriously.Tom
You can never have too many T shirts, I say.
No, you can't have too many t-shirts. But how much is that t-shirt going to cost?I'm with TOTWTYTR, I left NAEMT quite some time ago. Along with my state organization, NCAP. I don't think NAEMT is connected to reality, nor did I think NCAP was.What we need is maybe the NAFEMSP (National Association of Frustrated Emergency Medical Service Professionals).
You have a state organization? We don't, although we have a guy that claims to be president of it. Yeah, you read that right. And he's active in NAEMT.
TOT, you need a retweet button. Because I'd RT this. I can't find anything that the NAEMT has ever done. They certainly haven't done anything for me. We desperately need a representative organization. Could it ever be the NAEMT? No, probably not…(linked)
I had to look up retweet. I don't even tweet, never mind retweet. Just think of me as a 21st century Luddite.
I don't tweet, either. I think the retweet is something that you can add to the blog post to make it easy for others to just click on and sent by twitter to whomever is downtweet, which is not the same as down with twitter. :-)RM, Jr. would be groaning at that. OK. You probably are, too.AD just started twittering. We should probably shun him, or something like that. Maybe we can get him to organize the shunning by sending out tweets.Tom,Everyone will be so jealous of your $40 t-shirt. You can tell people that you get a free magazine subscription with the shirt.