David Long discusses the Tidewater Healthcare Education Expo, a five-and-a-half-day conference in May with over 115 classes for EMS professionals. The Tidewater EMS Council implemented Handtevy, a color-coded pediatric dosing system that reduced medication errors to zero in two years and was later adopted statewide by Virginia.
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Hey, welcome back to Coast Live. All right, so in May, hundreds of mobile healthcare professionals will come together to share their knowledge at the Tidewater Healthcare Education Expo in Chesapeake. Now that is an opportunity to connect and share the latest medical knowledge. It's really, really cool. David Long is here. He's the executive director of the Tidewater EMS Council. He's here to tell us more about this event. And also we're going to explain why we have this baby in a second. But just stick around, we'll get to that. All right, Dave, welcome to Coast Live. First off, can you just tell us, what is this expo?
What is it all about? So it's an established training conference and it's an opportunity for healthcare providers from across the Tidewater region to come gather together, learn, and just network.
So who are you trying to reach at home? Who do you want to attend this?
So we really target EMS professionals like EMTs and paramedics. We invite nurses and physicians. Really, it's for any healthcare provider that wants to come to a quality education experience and earn some continuing education credit.
And that's exactly it. It's all about education because you guys offer a ton of courses, classes that we'll get into a second. But there's also an awards dinner at the Expo.
There is, yeah. So if you can imagine, especially coming out of COVID just how they've worked over the past couple of years. And it's an opportunity to recognize excellence. And we've done that for over 30 years at the Tidewater EMS Council. And this really is an opportunity to highlight EMS providers and agencies, their service and their sacrifice.
Absolutely. All right, so let's talk a little bit about some of the courses and classes that you guys are going to be offering. That's why we have this baby here on the table. So what is this here to demonstrate?
So we're really excited about the fact that we're going to provide over 115 classes over a five and a half day period at the Expo. And we've got some really interesting deliveries. One in particular is called why do we or why the Heart Bleeds? And it's an actual heart anatomy dissection. We're using pig hearts to do that. So we think that's going to be really cool. We're really happy to have Dr. Peter Anteby with us. He's the founder of the Pediatric Emergency Standard, which you can see demonstrated here. The Tidewater EMS Council three years ago identified that we needed to improve the treatment of our pediatric patients. Yes, sir. So what we did is we implemented the hand heavy system. And over two years, we reduced the medication errors to our pediatric patients to zero.
Wow.
That was so significant. The Virginia office of EMS noticed that and they implemented hand tubby statewide. So in fact, we're the only or we're the first state in the country that has actually adopted the hand heavy system.
And that's me here today.
Right. So what this does is it helps us quickly treat our pediatric patients. So let's say in this case, we got a call for a baby having a seizure. We arrive on scene, equipment's in this bag and it's all color coded, as you'll see on this tape. So we lay out a tape starts at their head. We see where their feet end. So it's telling me that I have a newborn.
This is like a measuring tape.
Here it is. So it's a height based system. So then we have a booklet as well as an app on our hips that we can reference. This tells us the medication that we need and exactly how much. In this particular case, we'd be administering 0.3 milligrams of verse head.
And that's all according to the information laid out here.
That is correct. Yeah. Foolproof. And so this is an atomizing device that makes the medication in small molecules that can be readily absorbed through the nose. So we'd come up to the child and we'd quickly administer and then we would expect the baby to stop seizing and we can get them packaged up and transport them to the hospital.
And that's really incredible because that means that any medical professional who's able to respond to a scene is going to have exactly the tools that they need.
And it's consistent across the EMS agencies in the Tidewater region.
And there's a ton of other classes and courses like this that are going to be demonstrated at the.
That's correct, yeah. So one of the things we'd like you to do, you take this syringe. All you have to do is put it up and just square.
You see how that.
Yeah.
So it atomizes to a point that it's. Yeah.
That's so crazy. Wow.
David, thank you so much for joining.
Us on this show.
Thanks for having us here.
This is so special information. Where can people go if they need to find out more information?
They can go to our website, which is www.timsexpo.org. and then there's information there about how to register. And we're looking forward to having more people show up.
That was so cool. Thank you so much for bringing all of this here. David, you're a super cool guy. I hope to have you back so I can learn something else.
