EP 66: Overcoming Obstacles Part 2
Episode 66
Published Feb 5, 2024
Last updated Feb 18, 2026
Duration: 35:07
Episode Summary
Change is hard. Today’s episode continues the discussion of how to overcome the obstacles we set as reasons not to adapt to change. We look at standard responses on why things “won’t work” and give you options to overcome them.
Episode Notes
Jill McElwee joins Bill Godfrey, Pete Kelting and Don Tuten in part two of the discussion on how and why to adapt to change. We’ll address some of the common reasons given as to why we can’t change including:
- That’s not the way we do it around here.
- We can’t get the other neighboring agencies to make the transition and do this as well.
- Everyone is on different radios (interoperability).
- Our fire department doesn’t transport, so there’s no reason to make entry.
- We don’t believe in RTFs, so we (law enforcement) are just doing to do it ourselves.
- It’ll never happen here. It’s policy.
Watch this episode on YouTube at https://youtube.com/live/TVAbDHcLPgM
Transcript
Bill Godfrey:Last week we told you that we wanted you to save lives in an active shooter event, and that the two obstacles in your way were the bad guy and the clock. And we told you there's a third obstacle. Well, this week we're gonna pick up where we left off, part two of Overcoming the Obstacles. Stick around.
Welcome to the "Active Shooter Incident Management Podcast". My name is Bill Godfrey, your podcast host. Welcome back for part two about our obstacle overcomes on challenges that we hear from time to time. Of course, I've got Don Tuten and Pete Kelting back in the house with us, and we're also being joined by Jill. Like myself, I felt a little lonely about being the only fire person here last time around.
Jill McElwee:
I'm here for you.
Bill Godfrey:
Well, thank you for coming in and joining us for this one.
Don Tuten:
Hey, we got you on the right side of the table too. Look. Fire, police.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah.
Don Tuten:
This is, as we talk about integration, I think we messed up.
Jill McElwee:
True.
Bill Godfrey:
You know what? I need to get a couple recliners for our side.
Jill McElwee:
Well, these are more comfortable chairs but don't tell them.
Don Tuten:
Can't fix 'em. Can't fix 'em.
Pete Kelting:
Xbox console in front too.
Bill Godfrey:
Okay, so we've got a list of things that we've heard people say over time about reasons that they cannot implement this or it won't work in their jurisdiction. And I'm gonna start us off and then I'm just gonna randomly pick 'em and get your reactions to 'em. "So that's not the way we do it around here." Well, no duh, Dougie. I think my answer to that is I know that's not the way you do it here. That's why we're here. It would be kind of silly for us to travel halfway across the country to teach you how you already do it, but perhaps there's some techniques and some things that we can show you that'll save time on the clock, that'll help you neutralize the threat faster, and give you a better way to do it.
Don Tuten:
It's an excuse for every new skillset, you know, you can use any, look, we do training on the fire side, we do training on the law enforcement side. There's always a new skillset that's being pushed out there. And we can all say, "That's not the way we've done it here." Well no kidding. We're here to make it faster. We're here to make it better. We're here to work together. I mean, that's just how it works. But insert here for class. You can almost say any class for that. So that's a piss poor excuse.
Jill McElwee:
Yes, even in medicine, we say we practice medicine 'cause we're always learning things. And one of my responses often to students in the EMS world is, you know, we don't put butter on burns anymore either. So we're gonna do a new, we've got a new way. Yeah.
Don Tuten:
Yeah.
Bill Godfrey:
That's wonderful. Okay, so let's try this one. We can't get the other neighboring agencies to make the transition and do this as well.
Pete Kelting:
Yeah. I mean, we hear that a lot. you know, the territorial excuses, It also comes from competition of we do it our way, they do it their way. You know, how are we gonna bring that common path to look at a proven process that we have here in our class, right? To, you know, to get the same dedication and commitment to training from different agencies so that, again, you hear me say all the time on game day, we don't wanna be having those questions. We don't want to ask ourselves why didn't we train together? Why didn't we look at a process hat's gonna make each of our agencies better together with delegation and trust?
Don Tuten:
And I think this is almost, this one's going by the wayside. You almost can't say that anymore. You know why? 'Cause this is a standard. We all train to, you know, a standard. So it's a standard for your agency. It's a standard for my agency. It's just a matter of, okay, our two agencies are within the same jurisdictional area. We need to work together because we're both doing the same standard, now it's just a matter of, hey, let's communicate, let's get on the right page. Just all the little things. We know what we're doing, but let's get the little things knocked out.
Bill Godfrey:
It's interesting because it is a standard, you know, designated by NTOA as the national standard, but that doesn't make it binding, doesn't make it mandatory. People can still choose obviously, to do their own things. In fact, I suspect that most of the standards in our line of work, public safety, police, fire, EMS, the works, are actually voluntary standards. They're guidelines, they're suggested standards that we choose to adopt or not adopt. And I think that's part of the process, but there's safety in using standards because other people are using 'em too. It's you're not doing your own thing. You're not out there going, "Yee haw, let's try it my way." You've got the safety and standards, but they are voluntary.
Don Tuten:
They are, but you know what, it's a proven... I'll go back on the law enforcement side, we have a field training program, and most field training programs are pretty much the same. And you know why? Because they are proven, they're proven in court, they're proven to have the training necessary to train a new police officer to the standard that the community mandates from them. In my opinion, this is the exact same thing. This is a proven training program. The active shooter incident response is not only proven, it's cited in a lot of references around the country afterwards for the people that have taken these classes and they've had an incident. It's defendable all day long. So I agree with you, it is a guide. It, like anything, I mean, we all understand that.
Bill Godfrey:
Bill Godfrey:
Sure.
Don Tuten:
It is a guide, but when I say it's become the standard, I mean, it is literally pick and play, you know, insert and play. And even if you only get 50% of it right, you're 50% better than having no plan at all.
Jill McElwee:
Don, you hit it on the head though. It may not be your standard, but it is the standard or a standard you will be held to.
Don Tuten:
Exactly.
Jill McElwee:
And so that's where, whether you choose to adopt the standard or not, when an incident occurs, and I think we're at a time now, if you are in charge of an agency or any jurisdiction, you cannot use the term, "I wonder if this will happen in my community." We're at a time now you'd better start rephrasing that to "When this happens in our community, we are going to be prepared at this level." You know, so whatever level, you're making that decision for your community. And if you choose not to adopt a standard, no, that's fine. It just understood, well, you need to also have that understanding that that standard, the, you know, the true sense of the word, is what you will be held to.
Pete Kelting:
Yeah. You know, Bill and Jill talked about, you know, agencies that you can't say it's not gonna happen in your jurisdiction. You know, we were talking about an agency that we had delivered a class to that had an incident happen just a couple weeks after we had delivered a class.
Jill McElwee:
Yeah.
Pete Kelting:
And we got feedback from that. We, you know, we were proud to hear that our process made them feel better prepared to handle that incident. And that if they would've not already been exposed to that, they wouldn't have had some of the successes that they had.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah, I also, I don't wanna leave this one without throwing this out as well. We talked in part one about the power of keeping up with the Joneses. And I wanna relate a story briefly. So years ago when I was an EMS chief, we were, myself and another EMS chief in the neighboring jurisdiction, had this dream of getting a regional protocol. So for those of you that don't know, EMS systems, their paramedics operate on protocol directives by a physician. And pretty much every time you cross a jurisdiction line, the protocol changes. They all have different physicians and things like that. It's very hard to get 'em on a standard regional protocol. And we were struggling with trying to get everybody included, but yet allowing them to maintain that independent identity. And what we came up with was essentially a protocol document that had two columns. So on the left side was a column that was about two thirds of the page. And it had the content of the protocol, you know, in a cardiac arrest you'll do this and this and this and this. But that one third of the column that was over on the right hand side was a place where you could take exceptions. And what we got everybody to agree to is whatever the most aggressive advanced protocol procedure was that anybody was doing, that would become the standard. And then if your agency or your doc wouldn't sign off on it, then you would write right in the document, you know, agency X doesn't do this, they do this instead. Agency Y does this up to this point, but then does this instead. And that first year that we did that, I think in the first version of it, we had with five agencies, fairly large agents, it was a large region. We had over 120 exceptions. 120. A year later we went back and did a new version. We were down to a dozen exceptions.
Jill McElwee:
Yeah.
Don Tuten:
Wow. Yeah.
Bill Godfrey:
And in year three, there were zero exceptions with five different medical directors. And it was all about the power of keeping up with the Joneses.
Jill McElwee:
That's awesome.
Don Tuten:
Yeah.
Bill Godfrey:
And I think to some degree it was also for some of the medical directors who were reluctant to agree to some of those things, they said, "Okay, these other agencies have been doing this. It's been documented. They've been doing it this way for a couple of years. And the other docs have signed off on it. I'm not alone here. I have four other doctors that could get subpoenaed about why we felt this was the appropriate thing to do." And I think that can apply here as well. When you're starting off trying to get your entire region and all these different agencies on the same page, I think that kind of split format is a powerful way to get everybody in the door and get 'em started. They still can have their own identity. Well we don't use this term, we use this term, whatever. Stick it in the column, make it note as an exception because over time that's gonna go away. It's just too much effort to maintain the differences.
Jill McElwee:
But they feel they've had a voice. That's what it's about.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah.
Jill McElwee:
Yeah. You've had a voice, you've had input.
Don Tuten:
Well, and as you train to that policy, you're gonna find out that whatever those exceptions are, it's harder to try to do that.
Jill McElwee:
Justifying them. Yeah.
Don Tuten:
Or to do something different than what the majority of what everybody else is doing.
Pete Kelting:
And when you see your peer, sheriff, or chief, you know, on national television, having to, you know, justify the response and explain the response, and how we responded to our folks in the community, it's important that we wanna be on the right page in the same path forward.
Bill Godfrey:
So I'm gonna take a little tact on us on this one. So in a lot of our more rural jurisdictions, they have volunteers. Volunteer EMS, volunteer fire service, they have paid and volunteer combinations, all of those cases. So one of the things that we hear is it's difficult or impossible to get the volunteer agencies into training.
Don Tuten:
I'm gonna default a little bit on the fire side 'cause I think that's probably a little bit more than on the law enforcement side. Now we have volunteers, but it's after the fact for lack of better terms.
Jill McElwee:
Right, and with us, a lot of our communities, their volunteers are those frontline responders. They are comprising those rescue task forces, they are the triage, the transport officers on the fire side.
Bill Godfrey:
They're the paramedic and EMT on the only ambulance.
Jill McElwee:
They are it. Yes.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah.
Jill McElwee:
And for many miles. And while I would put most of those rural volunteer paramedics skills up against any inner city.
Bill Godfrey:
You bet.
Jill McElwee:
There's no doubt. You know, it demands and engagement. And so how we get that engagement is that's that magic, you know, the little magic potion there is getting those volunteer agencies engaged. Most people, if you've dedicated your life to the side part of your life, maybe not your bread winning side, but your to be a volunteer paramedic, firefighter, there's a reason you've done that. And it's probably not just because it's super cool to ride in the big red truck. I mean, it is, Bill, isn't it? So other than that, you know, you're there for a reason and to save lives. And I'm so thankful to be a part of this program that does recognize that just as important as stopping that killer, that clock and getting those injured, that definitive medical care, and providing that is so important. And if we engage those volunteer agencies and where they see they have a real and immediate impact on saving lives.
Don Tuten:
I think bring up a good point is, you know, volunteers want to be there.
Jill McElwee:
Yeah.
Bill Godfrey:
That's what I was gonna say.
Don Tuten:
And if you're saying, "Hey, we've got some additional training we want you..." They're gonna probably one of the first to take it 'cause they have no pushback. They're volunteering as it is anyway. They want to get better. And you guys, correct me if I'm wrong, but I know there's several counties here in the state of Florida still that have volunteer firefighters. Their whole goal is to be, to get as many runs, to get as much experience as they can. So hopefully they can apply or transition to a paid position.
Jill McElwee:
Sure.
Bill Godfrey:
I actually started as a volunteer and I, myself, and even the volunteers that were much older than me, I was pretty young, we wanted to get training. We looked forward to drill night and training night. The challenge is, is that a lot of the sanctioning agency, if you will, the underwriting agency, well, you know, their administrators are working Monday through Friday, 8:00 to 5:00. The training officer was full-time. He worked Monday through Friday, 8:00 to 5:00. He didn't want to come in on nights and weekends when we're available. And so you're asking your volunteers to take time off from their paid job to then sit in class for three days, that doesn't work. And what can work however, is take the content, chunk it up, put it on the training agenda, whether it's one night a week for a three hour or four hour night, or whether you do Saturday, you know, a Saturday and Sunday, eight hours each day, 10 hours. You feed 'em, you know, make it an an event. In some of these scenarios, you need volunteers. So maybe they can bring their family, you know, and engage them in that way. But you just, you don't change the content, you just change the delivery mechanism.
Jill McElwee:
That's it.
Don Tuten:
Absolutely.
Bill Godfrey:
Change the time of day, change how you're delivering it. If some of this can be done on their own, you know, you say, "Okay, here's the books, you need to read these three chapters. I mean, it is no different than when you're in college. You know, a professor assigns three chapters in one night and you're like, "Oh, okay, lemme go through." There's ways to get it done, but you have to meet them where they are with their needs. That would be my-
Don Tuten:
Well, and it goes back to if it's important to the administration-
Jill McElwee:
That's it.
Don Tuten:
It's gonna be important to the volunteers.
Pete Kelting:
Yeah. And I was gonna add, Jill, I do have a picture of Bill in a police car.
Jill McElwee:
Do you?
Pete Kelting:
That I can get to you just to show that, you know-
Jill McElwee:
Was it a full smile?
Pete Kelting:
He does enjoy riding in the police cars, but just what Don said, Bill-
Jill McElwee:
Yeah, but I was talking about it in the front though.
Pete Kelting:
Yeah. Okay, that's true. But just what Don said is, you know, making it a priority. You know, Bill, you mentioned it is, you know, we always hear, you know, "It's not gonna happen in our jurisdiction." And it's important to say, "I'm concerned that it will happen in our jurisdiction." We hope it doesn't. Right? But it will happen in our jurisdiction. And so no matter if you're a volunteer or if you're a, you know, a full-time equivalent with an agency, it's important that if you see the top believes in that, and you see that the priority is that we're concerned that it's gonna happen in our jurisdiction and everything's scheduled in training, then I wanna be a part of that training because you're telling me that your priority as a chief or a sheriff or fire chief is faced forward looking at that concern.
Jill McElwee:
And Bill, one thing I wanna add to this conversation, and we've often say it, and it's a cool thing to say when we're talking about instituting change, is that what has to start at the top.
Pete Kelting:
Embrace it.
Jill McElwee:
It has to start at... It doesn't have to start at the top, preferred that that change starts at the top. But just that continual push, that continual push from the bottom, you know, continual.
Bill Godfrey:
Where do you think the top gets their ideas, folks?
Jill McElwee:
Exactly. Exactly.
Don Tuten:
Well, they get it from the bottom. They get it from the community who demands it.
Jill McElwee:
But when people give up and say, "Well, our administration, they don't believe in this. They'll never, you know, they", for whatever reason. And that just giving up at the bottom level, well, then you are the reason. It's not administration.
Bill Godfrey:
You're now the obstacle.
Jill McElwee:
You are the obstacle.
Bill Godfrey:
You are the obstacle we're talking about.
Don Tuten:
I use body cameras. Do you think any administrator ever said, "You know what, I want to go spend millions of millions of dollars and implement a body camera program"? No. No.
Jill McElwee:
No.
Don Tuten:
Now they wouldn't change it now for the world, but with that said, that started at, not only did that start at the bottom, that started within the community.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah. All right, I'm gonna move us on. I'm gonna move us on. So here is a different one, a different topic. "Everyone is on different radios, so there's no possible way this can work. Everyone's on different radios, different radio channels. There's no way this can work."
Don Tuten:
Have you ever seen the Super Bowl? How many agencies do you think are, or any football game, NFL, college game? Everybody's on a different frequency, but you know what? They make that work.
Bill Godfrey:
I swear to God this is an absolutely true story. I was coming to do some review for Super Bowls or national security events. I was coming in to do some review and recommendations and they gave me their proposed communications plan. It was over 30 pages. And it was so complicated. It was so complicated I couldn't understand it. I had to schedule a conference and within 10 minutes, the people who wrote the plan were arguing with each other about what it meant. And as I sat back about 45 minutes into it, I went, "Guys, I think we understand the issue. This is too complicated. We need to narrow it down." So yeah, there's ways to overcome. So who's got some practical tips on how to overcome radio issues?
Pete Kelting:
- Well, I'll tell you, Bill, is, you know, in your training, in your full scale exercises or working with multiple jurisdictions, you should notice that right up front. I mean, since obviously we always say this since 9/11, we spent a ton of money to have-
Bill Godfrey:
Oh yeah.
Pete Kelting:
You know, fleets of channels that we can all access, but there's still those times that that becomes a problem. You know, agencies just identify the problem during training and be committed to fixing that problem. Even if it's, you know, having enough radios and radio banks ready to be handed out at staging. You know, overcome the problem even if it's a challenge.
Bill Godfrey:
I worked as an expert on interoperability. That's where I got involved in that Super Bowl story I just told. And I can tell you with absolute confidence, if you still have interoperable problems with your radios today, it is not a technology problem. It is a human problem. Whether it's a policy or we're not gonna let them be on our channel, I'm not gonna give them our decryption keys or if it's just basic. The cop on the street has never used that channel. He has no idea where to find it on his radio.
Don Tuten:
Yeah. This could be regional. I mean, this one, I think this is a minority when it comes down to it because this may be for that volunteer agency or those several volunteering agencies or that smaller agency in law enforcement that has to rely on the state to come in and assist them on certain things. So I agree with you. I think since 9/11, there's been so many millions of dollars put towards communication-
Bill Godfrey:
There has been, Don, but I don't think we've solved the problem. I think this problem is worse than ever because of all those different channels.
Don Tuten:
Well, I think this is a whole nother topic. You know, I think this is, this warrants a whole another topic because I can tell you just, I used to sit on those state board as well. And once again, I think this could just go in a whole different direction once we started talking.
Jill McElwee:
Yeah, in my head, I've like three or four-
Bill Godfrey:
All right, practical tips. Let me focus this.
Jill McElwee:
Yeah.
Bill Godfrey:
Practical tips. They show up at the scene and every jurisdiction has a different radio or radio frequency they're using. How do you solve that problem?
Don Tuten:
So first and foremost, the easiest thing is have a liaison. You have people standing there with their one radio frequency in command and what they're doing is they're... I mean, that's the easiest way to do it right off the bat, is you're having basically-
Jill McElwee:
Hear, repeat.
Don Tuten:
Yep, exactly.
Jill McElwee:
Listen, repeat.
Don Tuten:
Exactly
Jill McElwee:
It's easy.
Pete Kelting:
Engage your communication specialists, your telecom techs early on in the training so that they're ready to present a solution to that challenge.
Jill McElwee:
How many times have we been in class ad we'll hear, we talk about this communication issues with, we'll have different agencies in the room and they say, "Well, actually we can't talk to them." And then the lone little dispatcher is sitting on the back row says, "We can actually patch them if they would just ask."
Don Tuten:
Yeah.
Jill McElwee:
You know, so it's just knowing-
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah, they don't even know what the solutions are.
Jill McElwee:
The technology is there.
Bill Godfrey:
I'm gonna go more practical on this one. That's one of the jobs in staging.
Don Tuten:
Yep. I agree.
Jill McElwee:
Mm-hmm.
Bill Godfrey:
When everybody reports to staging and you've got half a dozen officers and you need to field contact team and there's two or three of 'em that are on different radio channels, you put one person on the team that has the radio channel you need and then you fill out the rest of that team with the guys that don't have the radios that can talk. 'cause only one person on that team needs to talk on the radio. Go.
Don Tuten:
And we do that, we do that for special events and we call other agencies in now. What makes it different?
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah, exactly. I think that that's a practical tip. All right, any more practical tips on that one before we leave? I wanna get a couple of others.
Don Tuten:
You know, I think pre-planning is the biggest thing. I mean, not just for active shooter incident management, but hopefully you've thought this out for, you know, other natural disaster events as well.
Jill McElwee:
Regional training is so important and often overlooked because we only have a certain amount of time, you know, we'll go back to one of these excuses we have or reasons, which should be translated to excuses, is I've gotta train my guys on our plans and policies. I don't have time to get with the other regions. But regional training, if you, whatever agency you are part of law enforcement, fire, EMS, ensure that part of your training incorporates your regional partners. And everything.
Bill Godfrey:
Yeah. Just open it up. Just open it up and invite the other agency.
Jill McElwee:
Absolutely.
Bill Godfrey:
Okay. I got two that are kind of related, so I'm gonna lump them together. "Our fire department doesn't transport, so there's no reason for them to make entry and go inside." And then the second part of this one, "We don't believe in RTFs. We, as in law enforcement, are just gonna do it ourselves." So let's kind of talk about that one. What are some of the overcomes?
Don Tuten:
Well, I can't speak on behalf of the fire department, but I will say this on the law enforcement side is when we started implementing the training into real life scenarios, we started small. And we said this on the last time we met last week, but we started small. We started, we pre-planned events, football games, concerts. We started putting the RTFs together. Now, when we first started this, look, we had a little bit of pushback. We're paying overtime for somebody just to sit there for nothing to happen. We're having to bring in extra people. With that said, we had one incident several years ago within the first year that we put this together and it was within two blocks of the stadium where we had a national football game going on and it paid dividends. Ever since then, it is a standard norm. It is for every big event that we have, we have pre-planned, scheduled RTF set up. Now what that does is this, number one, it identifies the roles and it allows people to work those roles as law enforcement and as fire. The other thing it does is, once again, it makes it part of the check box for a, like I said, for a pre-planned event. It's easier to implement it and put it in as that standard if any type of incident comes up. So I don't know how you guys think about it on the fire side, but I know on the law enforcement side and within our, you know, our agencies and I don't wanna speak for Pete, but I know for us it is something that we had to be taught. It is something that we had to understand. But look, I don't know how to put needles in people. I don't know, look, you know, my thing is, is as law enforcement, that's not our bailiwick, so if we don't plan for it now, then we're behind times.
Jill McElwee:
I'll tell you though, for the fire department side, recognizing that there are fire departments across the nation. There are not as many as there were before, but they want nothing to do with transporting patients. That is-
Bill Godfrey:
Well, not only transporting patients, but they don't even do EMS.
Jill McElwee:
They don't do EMS. They may have an EMT.
Bill Godfrey:
No medical training at all.
Jill McElwee:
Right but what they do have is they have that first responder training. It's part of curriculum as a firefighter. There is a basic level of first response. And at its most basic level on a penetrating injury, which is from an active shooter, any type of penetrating injury, recognizing, you know, how much blood is in the human body and if the blood is on the ground as opposed to the human body. Just that recognizing that from a very basic first response level, you don't need to have your national registry paramedic to recognize that this patient with a chest injury and that's bleeding out, is in worse shape than this patient with a leg injury. So that fire department is the ideal component to put with that security force to get those injured out to where they can be transported by whatever agency you use for your transport. That's why you we incorporate that, the different arenas of the casualty collection point.
And that's where the act of triage, you know, the action of triage is really taking place so that we most appropriately then put the patient that needs to go before, you know, who needs to go first, second, that's sorting, the pure meaning of the word triage, into the appropriate ambulance so they can get to the hospital in an appropriate order. So if the fire department, I would push back on any agency that says, "Well we're just, you know, just have the police just bring 'em out to us because that, the minutes. And again, I want us be able to, in future classes, I want incorporate some kind of little clock that's just ticking the whole time we're in class 'cause I want us on scene to just hear that clock is just as deadly as the assailant or the suspect is, is that clock and every ounce of blood that is not in the vessels where it should be providing those, you know, oxygen and nutrients to our body, that's where the person is dying. So we're contributing, you know, it's almost like, I don't wanna say we're doing the bad guys or girls' job for them, but we're certainly not stopping what it is that their intent was. So having that initial before, you know, don't wait to treat in the back of the ambulance. That treatment should start immediately on contact and the faster that treatment starts, the more lives are gonna be saved.
Pete Kelting:
Yeah, and you know, Bill, we address this in our classes quite often when we see that there's agencies that say, "Well, we're gonna do law enforcement transport. We're gonna collect everybody up and pull 'em out and start driving them somewhere. Maybe as a last resort if the whole process has fallen apart on you, but, you know, we constantly remind them that just like Jill was saying, that treatment, that advanced life care happening as quickly as possible is important. And then if we're transporting, just law enforcement taking care of everything, are they going to the right hospital? Is the hospital full? You know, they can't accept that level of, you know, trauma at that hospital. So it's important that we see that we work together in the process, train together in the process, and get that best effort to get that treatment.
Bill Godfrey:
We actually have as a future topic on a podcast coming up to discuss the ideas of law enforcement transporting. It is an in-depth topic. I'm gonna look at this one much, much more pragmatic. Moving people around that have been injured, takes a certain amount of man power. And you may have a fire department that doesn't have any medical training, but they know how to lift and move people. They're assisting with that stuff on a regular basis. Here's the other problem. If your EMS is entirely your ambulance service, who's going in? It is frightening to me the number of communities that we've been in across this country, and it's been more common than not, the fire department doesn't do any EMS, ambulance does all EMS, and they've never had the conversation about who's going inside. 'Cause if the medic and the EMT off the ambulance go in, that is an ambulance that's now parked in the parking lot that is no longer an ambulance. And so you need a plan. And that plan may be that the paramedic goes in and a firefighter drives so that the EMT can take care of the patient during transport.
There is no perfect plan and I'm not advocating that. I'm just saying have a plan. You need manpower to move people around. And this is about time to intervention. It's not that law enforcement can't get the patients out. Left to their own, they will always get the patients out. It may not be very quick, especially if it happens to be a law enforcement agency that doesn't have large resources. If you're in a very large metro downtown area that's saturated with hundreds of police officers, you might have enough cops to go grab and drag people out faster than anything. But if they're dragging somebody that's got a femoral artery bleed or dragging somebody that's got attention pneumo, even that couple of minutes can be the difference between, you know, being a fatality or not. Transporting in the back of a police car is not an ideal situation. And you know, again, I don't want to get us off on that, but here's the reality. If you're having to transport in the back of a police car, then something has gone wrong with your EMS system.
Don Tuten:
Yep.
Bill Godfrey:
We have an EMS system in this country for a reason. We have ambulances, we have EMTs and paramedics for a reason. If it is not working on your active shooter event, then fix the problem. That's a problem so to me this one's just more practical.
Don Tuten:
I think we talk about this also, doesn't every fire department have a mass casualty plan?
Jill McElwee:
Right. Ideally.
Bill Godfrey:
They're supposed. whether or not they've exercised it. And then of course if it's a fire department that doesn't do any medical at all, they may not look at that as part of their responsibility. Its' a toss up.
Jill McElwee:
That's a good point that Don brings up. So the next agency we go to that presents us with this, I'm gonna ask if they have their red, yellow, and green tarp on their engines. I bet they do.
Bill Godfrey:
Okay, we're coming up here on our time. I'm gonna throw a couple more out at you. So here's one I love. "150 years of tradition unimpeded by progress. It'll never happen here." Pete.
Pete Kelting:
That's policy. That's policy that administrations don't want to embrace change. It's policy that takes too much work to change it in the mindset. "It's working great for us and we're not gonna move, you know, it's not gonna happen to us anyway so we'll just let that go The way it's going."
Don Tuten:
I go back to the community has a standard by which they expect you to do your job. And they set policy a lot of times. Once again, I'll use body cameras. You know, cameras are the best thing ever. Never once said any police chief or sheriff until they got 'em, quite honestly. 'Cause there was miss, there was a lot of miss. But right now, like I said, it's one of the best things that has happened in law enforcement.
Jill McElwee:
I look back to the early days of EMS and I mean, I have a pretty low paramedic number, like one of those first ones, but not the first. Not I don't think I'm quite as low as you, your number is, Bill, but I'm right there with you and-
Bill Godfrey:
Had to go there, didn't ya?
Jill McElwee:
Uh-huh. But I say that because the things we did when we were first on as paramedics.
Bill Godfrey:
We didn't know any better.
Jill McElwee:
No. And then what we've done now, it's if you aren't learning from your lessons, I'll call them mistakes, but they're lessons. And this phrase is often attributed to the fire department. You know, we are now well over 200 years of tradition unimpeded by progress, that you are just, you are stuck in the yester year and progress is so important, especially with the technology that we have, with the advanced medical treatments that we have, with the technology of the body cams, the ability to correct some of those things we did early on. It's vital that we do that, that we stay on that cutting edge and we talk about honing our tools, and that's how you hone your tools. You just, you gotta knock off-
Don Tuten:
Other than your work rest hours, I think this is going away. I don't think you guys are ready to come off the, you know, 24 hour shifts yet, so.
Jill McElwee:
Yeah. Oh no.
Bill Godfrey:
So here's what I was, 'cause I do want this to be about overcomes and so here would be my way of overcoming this is to say, okay, you know, fair enough. You are very used to the way things are and you're very steeped in your tradition and your history, even though there's evidence after evidence that says that sometimes you need to change things for the better. If I gave you an overwhelming amount of evidence to the point at which it would be unreasonable to reject it, would you then agree that you should look at this and move on this? Well, yeah, sure.
Jill McElwee:
Sure.
Bill Godfrey:
Okay. Here's this, here's the validation. Here's the NTOA adoption. Here it is in DHS. Here's the approval from NIMS ICS. Here's what people have said about the training and about the process when they've had to use it on events. Tell me at what point I hit your limit of overwhelming evidence. You know, it is a challenge sometimes to move people off of this stuff. And that brings me to my final one, which I'm gonna kind of do myself and then we're gonna wrap up here for time. Changing policy is hard and can take forever. Yeah. It is hard. Changing is hard. Nobody said it was gonna be easy.
Jill McElwee:
No.
Bill Godfrey:
This is what change looks like. This is what hard looks like. Changing policy's hard. Yeah. And this is what work looks like. This is what hard looks like. So buckle up and do the work because people's lives are at risk.
Pete Kelting:
Absolutely.
Don Tuten:
Absolutely.
Bill Godfrey:
Jill, Pete, Don, thank you guys for coming in.
Pete Kelting:
Thank you, Bill.
Bill Godfrey:
It's exciting to be able to wrap this one up with part two. Thank you for listening and joining us on the podcast. Please like and subscribe it. If you have not shared it with other people, please take a minute to share. The more people we reach, the more that we can share this information, the more lives that can be saved. I wanna thank our producer, Tarla Corre.... Karla Tor... Sorry, Karla. I wanna thank our producer Karla Torres, who will probably not edit that out just to torture me with it. And until next time, stay safe.