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April is National Distracted Driving Awareness Month and, in support of this traffic safety initiative, NHTSA will be kicking off its annual “U Text. U Drive. U Pay.” national high visibility enforcement campaign to prevent distracted driving. Additionally, NHTSA has developed a robust social media strategy designed to raise public awareness about the consequences of […]
Officials from several agencies gathered in Washington in early December for a meeting of the Federal Interagency Committee on EMS (FICEMS), which helps coordinate EMS-related policy and planning issues across the Federal Government. The agenda included a discussion of some of the responses received to a recent Request for Information (RFI) about how to improve […]
Several new and returning members of the National EMS Advisory Council were sworn in and discussed their priorities at a meeting in Washington in October. A complete list of current NEMSAC members is available on EMS.gov. The council discussed a wide range of topics, from improving data analysis in EMS to addressing staffing shortages in both […]
The opioid crisis has raised questions about the best way to address patients’ pain in the field. While there’s no evidence tying prehospital administration of narcotics to addiction or overdose deaths, finding alternatives to managing pain could reduce the amount of opioids in the field. At the same time, it is critical that patients’ pain […]
At a forum in September in Washington, speakers challenged EMS leaders in the audience to begin making the changes necessary to achieve a truly people-centered EMS system. “Doing things that are truly people-centered will take hard work and create bruised egos,” said Andy Gienapp, director of the Wyoming Office of EMS. “But that’s our challenge. […]
This past fall the NHTSA Office of EMS and National 911 Program welcomed four new members to the team. Each of them brings unique expertise and experience, and they are excited to contribute to the important work of improving EMS systems across the country. The four new members are: Eric Chaney, Emergency Medical Services Specialist […]
On average from 2001 to 2005 (the last year for which complete data is available), about 40 percent of all fatalities during the Christmas and New Year holiday periods have occurred in crashes where at least one of the involved drivers was alcohol-impaired as compared to about 28 percent of all fatalities during the rest […]
Halloween is meant to be scary, but not when it comes to driving…when it comes to drunk driving, Halloween can turn the roads into a horror fest. From 2012-2016, 44% of all people killed on motor vehicle crashes on Halloween night (6 P.M. October 31 – 5:59 A.M. November 1) were in crashes involving a drunk driver. […]
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced that 37,133 people were killed on U.S. roadways in 2017, a 1.8% decrease from 2016. Historically, a strong economy and employment rate – as we have now – correlates with an increase in traffic deaths, so this drop, while small, is encouraging news. Of […]
The Office of EMS seeks public input on current effort by October 1st, 2018 More than 350,000 people experience out-of-hospital cardiac arrest in the U.S. each year; less than half of them receive bystander CPR before professional first responders arrive, even though early CPR is known to greatly increase an individual’s chances of survival. CPR […]
