Combo Medic

I know that we don't typically take the time to think about who would respond to our residence should we become ill or injured.  I also know that we typically say that we want everybody that we teach to be able to respond to our house to handle our family, but we never think it is going to happen to us. Really, think about it!!!  Who would you want responding to your house if you were suffering from an acute myocardial infarction.  I know that there are many great EMS educators out there, and I am sure there are some out there that are better than I am so do I need my students to respond to me and my family.  Well, I am not sure, but in a recent situation I was certainly glad to come up on a family members house only to see 2 of the responders were graduates from a program I helped teach, another was a close friend and assistant instructor for my classes and now adjunct faculty for me and I knew my grandmother was in good hands. Tonight is going to be a extremely...

So I find professions within the realm of a firefighter and EMS professional interesting. Now, you read that first sentence and I am sure you are confused. Their profession would be firefighter and EMS professional...right? However, I am speaking more about their second profession. We all know that in the fire service and EMS community, we typically work 1, 2 or even 3 (hopefully not) side jobs to help us pass the time, and simply to make more money. When looking at the side professions of our emergency services professions it seems like one trend continues to show. We are either scuba divers, webmasters, or have a lawn care service. Now, I know there are many more than that, but a look down the twitter pages of a group of emergency services professionals comes up these same topics in their by-lines. Now our schedule is great when it comes to second professions. While our 216 to 240 hour per month schedule is much higher than the 9-5 rotations, we still have additional days...

I spent several days thinking about what to call my new blog. I look at those out there that have used a play on the word fire, medic, emt, and many others and really found it quite difficult. Every time I thought about a new nom de guerre, I would simply google it and find that it has already been used. I have long liked the term firemedic describing the last 8 years of my career, while I have also thought about podmedic since I have started joining that, but I have finally settled on ComboMedic. Why, because like most in EMS, I still don't know what I am going to do with my life. This blog is going to compliment the other opportunities that I am able to participate in right now. I have been working with Greg Friese (@gfriese) and others from the EMS Educast to start the EMS Educast Mini. This is an opportunity to take ideas that are pressing in the EMS Education realm and podcast them to the public. The first episode on Fitness in EMS Education has posted (http://www.emse...