Lately, I’ve been thinking about my blog and also about speaking engagements. In fact, a fellow blogger and I were discussing conference topics. She and I were both complaining about some of the topics that people seem to like us to speak or write about. For a while after getting into EMS, I wanted to be known as something other than the paramedic/attorney who speaks about legal issues. So, I tried a few presentations on clinical topics. They went over OK, but that’s not what people wanted to hear about from a paramedic/attorney. Truth be told, I know several people who do much better “medical” presentations than I do. Kelly Grayson and Bryan Bledsoe are both phenomenal speakers who have a real ability to take a difficult medical topic and put it into terms that a rookie EMT can master.
Over time, I began to realize something, namely that Kelly and Bryan (and most other EMS types) aren’t attorneys. And I know that I can present a medical-legal lecture that’s fun, informative, and accurate. Being an attorney and a paramedic is something kind of different in our EMS world. So, I’ve become one of the few people who OWNS the medical-legal topic. (By the way, I also OWN the topic of turning a volunteer program into a success. More on that in another blog post.)
So, back to my friend. She says that her most popular blog post was about dressing professionally. My advice to her — OWN the topic of EMS professionalism. It’s something that needs doing well. With the amount of “low information medics” on social media, we all need a reminder about acting professional. Even worse, so many of the popular EMS columnists and authors who write about ethics and professionalism come across as overly moralistic scolds whose shaming of natural human responses would make the Spanish Inquisition blush. Anyways, I hope she OWNS the topic of EMS professionalism.
What’s your EMS topic that you’re passionate about? OWN it — and share that passion with your colleagues and others.
More important than “what you do best” is “what you do better than anybody else does”.
(Is the legal crossover stuff your best EMS-related skill? I don’t know you, but I’m betting not. It’s just your _rarest_ skill. So not the thing you do better than any other _thing_, but the thing you do better than any other _person_…or at least better than any other person who’d be competing with you at it.)
If I’m calling for an ambulance, I don’t care at all how good a lawyer you are, or how good a teacher Kelly is. But if I’m organizing speakers for a conference, I care more about those things than, frankly, how good you are at saving lives. 🙂
As a nurse, the topic that I am passionate about is patient education, and within that is patient advocacy.
Too many patients that I have encountered have very little knowledge about their condition/disease process. Physicians, as mandated by the large groups they work for, only have 10, maybe 15 minutes with each patient. That just isn’t enough time to fully educate a patient. It therefore up to each patient to do their own independent research on the topic, and hope that they choose the right resource to get their information from. Of course, after reading that information the patient then has more questions; then what? See where I’m headed with this?
When I was a medic, I was transporting a patient to the hospital, and asking him what his physician had told him about his blood pressure medication. I can’t say I was surprised that, as he stated, “he told me that I needed to take it, but didn’t tell me why”. Since we had a 15 minute transport time to the hospital we had a long discussion about why it was so important for him to be compliant with his medications. I could see the light go on when we were done with our discussion.
Patients don’t want to hear “take your medication because I say so”, they want to know why it’s so important. If you tell them the why, the chances increase that they’ll be more compliant with their medications and treatments.