Award Paperwork needs to be submitted to the HVREMSCO office no later than 1 May 2015!
One Agency and one EMS Communications Specialist from the Hudson Valley Region were selected by the New York State Department of Health and Trauma Services to be presented with awards at the Opening Session of the 2014 Vital Signs Conference.
Rockland Mobile Care was selected for Excellence in EMS Quality and Safety, and Victoria Phillip was selected as EMS Communication Specialist of the Year. The following are excerpts from their award nominations:
Rockland Mobile Care
“Rockland Mobile Care’s staff and administration have embraced a culture of safety as a core value within the organization. The service strives to mitigate hazards in the pre-hospital environment for the public, its staff and the patients it serves. RMS successfully reduced work related injuries resulting from moving and lifting of patients by evaluating each reported injury, determining the practice, procedure or engineering control involved in the injury and implementing changes in equipment, staffing, policies and procedures to remove or mitigate the potential for injury. This process identified back injuries resulting from stretcher operations. The predominant cause of these injuries was determined to be vertical lifting and lowering of patient laden stretchers. RMC’s administration and staff ultimately completed its review of various solutions and decided to purchase Stryker’s Power-PRO XT stretchers. Since deploying the Stryker stretchers into its fleet, RMC has experienced an 82% reduction in stretcher related back injuries.”
Victoria Phillip
“In addition to her overall dedication and longevity to Emergency Services the year 2013 was an eventful one for Victoria. Within a matter of two weeks Victoria fielded two calls in which proactive EMD and a seamless chain of survival directly contributed to the preservation of life. On September 18, 2013 Victoria was the call taker for a 1 year old choking in the City of Kingston. Taking control of the call with an extremely irate mother and obtaining the basic information, Victoria moved to reading EMD instructions word-for-word and focusing the mother on removal of the foreign body airway obstruction. The obstruction – a large toy – was expelled prior to arrival of EMS and the child quickly started breathing normally. This call was used as a training tool as the EMD instructions were delivered flawlessly and the difficult task of focusing an irate individual to perform lifesaving maneuvers was extremely successful. The mother involved credited Victoria’s assistance with helping to save her son. Within two weeks of this same call Victoria again was the calltaker for an EMS call in the Town of Saugerties at a Diner. Staff called and Victoria had to talk to untrained and reluctant bystanders to begin CPR on a witnessed arrest. CPR was started and the successful chain of survival and early successful EMD resulted in the patient surviving and eventually being discharged.”
The HVREMSCO offers its congratulations to the Management and Staff of Rockland Mobile Care, for their dedication to provider and patient safety, and to Victoria Phillip for her outstanding performance as a dispatcher. These awards exemplify the excellence demonstrated daily by the Providers, Dispatchers and Management that strive on a daily basis to set the performance bar higher.
