Yelping The Eagles

Anyone who knows me knows that as much as I love EMS and law, I also enjoy good food and have a tendency to write reviews of good (and occasionally bad) food on Yelp.  This weekend, I’ve attended the Gathering of Eagles conference in Dallas.  Seeing as Yelp probably isn’t the forum to review the Eagles, I’ll blog my review instead.

Sum total 4/5 stars.

This was my first time attending the Gathering of Eagles conference, but it will definitely not be my last.  This is unlike virtually any other EMS conference.  First, the presentations are exceptionally short.  For many of us, it’s perfect for short EMS attention spans.  For others, the presentations are just enough to whet your appetite to dig deeper into the subject.  For some of those subjects, I’m probably in the latter.  Other subjects were brief enough so as to not lose my interest.

I also appreciated the value for the money.  For the cost of admission, you get two days of continuing education as well as continental breakfast, cold drinks during the day, and lunch both days.  I can’t think of any other conference that delivers that kind of value.

The other huge positive to Eagles is the accessibility.  Each of the physicians readily made themselves available to the audience for questions immediately after their presentation and around the conference.  In fact, at the lunches, the conference organizers made an effort to have an “Eagle” physician at each table.  The opportunity to talk informally — and learn — from some very respected physicians rarely presents itself this easily.

The final advantage to this conference is that the audience largely selects itself.  This isn’t a conference designed for the average provider.  It’s heavily science and research driven.  There’s quite the smattering of medical students, residents, EMS fellows, and physicians in the audience as well as senior EMS management.  There’s not a finer networking opportunity anywhere.

There are two caveats to this conference, although they’re nowhere enough to discourage attending.  First, with the heavy focus on research, there’s a strong emphasis on cardiac arrest and resuscitation.  In other words, dead versus not dead is easy to measure.  Second, the Eagles represent very large EMS systems.  These systems, by their very nature, are large urban systems.  Their models of care don’t necessarily easily translate to smaller systems where changes can be rolled out more quickly to a smaller number of providers.   In other words, not all that is presented here will be new to providers in more progressive or aggressive EMS systems. (Perhaps there’s a need for a separate conference with the physician medical directors of suburban and rural EMS systems.)

Having said all of this, I will definitely be back next year.