NYU Langone Hospital—Long Island offers a range of opportunities for NYU Grossman Long Island School of Medicine trainees to learn from emergency medical services (EMS) teams and gain experience in prehospital care.

Our hospital-based EMS provides 911-dispatched care to the Village of Garden City with two paramedic-staffed ambulances available 24 hours a day. This provides a remarkable opportunity for trainees to ride with the crews and learn about EMS in suburbia. Our team also runs numerous EMS units in the busy New York City 911 system, offering additional opportunities to experience a very busy urban EMS system.

NYU Langone’s Emergency Management and Enterprise Resilience team manages disaster and multiple casualty incident drills and training as well as hospital emergency response protocols. Our trainees have the opportunity to interface and train with this valuable resource.

Our goal is for trainees to build a foundation of EMS knowledge, which includes the following:

• common organizational structures of EMS
• educational requirements and skill levels of various EMS providers
• principles of EMS system operations
• basic principles of disaster management
• principles of prehospital triage and emergency medical care delivery
• basic principles of EMS research
• medical–legal principles that relate to EMS

Emergency Medical Services Objectives

Our objectives are designed to provide a broad education in EMS. Trainees actively participate in the EMS system, such as ground unit runs and direct medical oversight, which includes both adult and pediatric emergencies. Trainees participate in medical direction calls, quality assurance and quality improvement reviews of EMS calls, and on-scene medical direction.

Trainees learn how to describe local, state, and national components of EMS, the collaborative protocols that provide framework for EMS care, and the different levels of EMS providers and how they integrate into the system. They also learn the ins and outs of medical–legal liability issues relating to EMS, and how to describe common environmental, toxicologic, and biological hazards encountered in the prehospital care setting as well as injury prevention techniques.

We prepare learners to provide initial and continuing education to all levels of EMS personnel. They learn to provide educational feedback after calls and give a topic-based continuing medical education lecture for EMS providers.

Trainees become familiar with the development of EMS prehospital care protocols and discuss the importance of and methods for medical control in EMS systems, as well as the importance of communications for the success of the system.

The basic concepts of mass casualties are taught, and trainees become familiar with basic concepts of disaster management, response, and medical care on a local, state, and national level. We provide opportunities to observe and participate in a mass casualty incident drill at NYU Langone Hospital—Long Island and teach the principles of triage and disaster management. As part of training, learners become familiar with the Incident Command System (ICS), learn about national response framework and disaster medical assistance teams (DMAT), and complete ICS courses 100, 200, 700, and 800.

By the end of training, learners are able to demonstrate an understanding of the scope of practice and appropriate utilization practices for ground and air medical services, including those of the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) at the giving and receiving hospital, and how to choose method of transport.