A mangled extremity, uncontrolled bleeding, bad weather grounding every helicopter nearby, and a trauma center nearly an hour away. Sometimes the biggest challenge is  figuring out what to do when the ideal plan is no longer available. Ross talks with critical care flight paramedic Jim Phipps about a severe farm-auge…

Johanna Quist-Nelson

The hardest calls fall apart when communication is unclear, roles blur, feedback feels personal, and the team starts working around each other instead of with each other. Today, Ross and Will talk with Dr. Daryl Johnson, Adult Trauma Medical Director for the UNC Health Trauma Program, about what it takes to build tea…

The mechanism behind agricultural emergencies can completely change the risk to both the patient and the responders arriving to help. Ross talks with Jessica Wilburn, Agromedicine Nurse Coordinator, and Maggie Denning, Outreach Coordinator with the North Carolina Agromedicine Institute, about the injuries and environ…

The First 60 Seconds After ROSC: How To Prevent Re-Arrest How do you improve your resuscitation systems beyond the ACLS algorithm? Will talks with Ian Blanchard, Senior Scientist for Alberta’s provincial EMS system about the “frame of survival” and why rehearsing equipment placement and vector change can make critic…

Getting a pulse back feels like a win. Seeing pacer spikes and something that resembles a pulse feels reassuring. But in both situations, the monitor can make you feel better before the patient actually is. Geoff Murphy of Master Your Medics breaks down the fragile minutes after return of spontaneous circulation. He…

Burn patients can create a disproportionate amount of anxiety. The calls are uncommon, the injuries can be visually overwhelming, and it is easy to get distracted by the burn itself. Ross and Will talk with Mark Johnston, a longtime Advanced Burn Life Support instructor and burn program leader at Regions Hospital, ab…

Readiness is about more than knowing the medicine. It’s about creating the conditions for patients, families, and clinicians to feel safer and more capable when the situation is unfamiliar, overwhelming, or high risk. First up, Boston MedFlight flight nurse Nicole King discusses neurodivergence, sensory overload, and…

What differentiates heat stroke from heat exhaustion? Once central nervous system dysfunction appears, every minute spent at an elevated core temperature increases the risk of permanent neurologic injury or death. Ross and Will talk with emergency physician and wilderness medicine specialist Dr. Greg Doctor about the…

Most people picture a master clinician as the person in the room who knows every answer. In reality, mastery looks like the opposite, and admitting what you do not know. Ross talks with FlightBridgeED co-founder Eric Bauer about the “rage to mastery”, the advice that kept him in EMS after a series of difficult calls…

The calls that scare clinicians the most are often the ones they have the fewest opportunities to practice. So what happens during a rare, high consequence emergency? First, Jennifer Barnhart of Austin-Travis County EMS and Sergeant Luke Serrato of the Austin Police Department discuss the response to a mass casualty…

The hardest part of evidence-based medicine is not finding a paper. It is deciding whether that paper should change what you do on your next shift. First, we talk with Dr. Jeff Jarvis about how to evaluate medical literature beyond the headline, abstract, conclusion, or p-value. You’ll hear about the PICO framework a…

Trust is the architecture behind every patient interaction you run. Dr. Cory Scheer, author of Closing the Trust Gap, has identified three evidence-based building blocks of trust: competency, problem-solving, and care for others. It turns out EMS providers already use all three the moment they step on scene. In this…

The hardest part of a bad call is rarely the algorithm. In two different interviews I explore some human traps of running an EMS call. I talk with Danny and Rance from DNR Prehospital Education about a choking arrest, a difficult field intubation, and the trainer-trainee dynamic that made the call more complicated tha…

A postpartum patient does not need to look dramatic to be in real danger. In this episode from FAST 26, Ross talks with Amy Loucks about pregnancy-related deaths, maternal care deserts, postpartum warning signs, hypertension, cardiomyopathy, infection, and the calls EMS can easily miss. Then Elizabeth Garchar walks th…

Pre-Oxygenation is not just putting oxygen on the patient and hoping the sat buys you enough time. In this episode, Ross talks with Scott Weingart after his FAST26 talk on preventing peri-intubation arrest. They get into why many peri-intubation arrests are predictable and preventable, why shunt physiology requires p…

A checklist should reduce cognitive load. So why does yours make things worse? Airline pilot and safety officer Glenn Fisher breaks down how aviation refined checklists over decades of crash data and human factors research — from verification-only flows to abnormal read-and-do procedures to defining the criteria for w…

Pediatric sepsis is easy to miss because the first hour often looks ordinary. Kids compensate, until they don't. In this episode, Will Berry talks with Dr. Peter Antevy about the case that still bothers him and why fluids, vasopressors, antibiotics, and hospital feedback all have to be treated as one resuscitation sys…

Most EMS skills training creates an illusion of competence. You drill a procedure, check a box, and move on. But what does the research actually show about competency and retention? Dr. Jason Hine (EM physician, SimKit founder) breaks down the actual science of procedural skill acquisition: S-curves, encoding and con…

Stephanie Suzadail's favorite word is "fail." She'll tell you why and how we should embrace it. In this episode she walks through the difference between failure that builds you and failure that breaks you. Why Sisyphus is a warning, not a role model. Why the best clinicians you'll ever work with have made bigger mist…

Most medics walk onto a domestic violence scene armed with instinct and not much else. Jim Schmidt thought 20 years in the fire service had prepared him for anything — until he had to identify his stepdaughter Gabby Petito's body in 2021. In the months and years after he realized how little EMS is prepared to recogniz…

Don't Be A Field Training Officer Be A Field Training Mentor. Field training is about more than teaching skills, it shapes culture, standards, and the kind of clinician someone becomes. In this episode, Ross sits down with Ben Tacy onsite at FASTCAN to talk about the origins of field training and why Ben prefers the…

Frostbite is more dangerous than it looks and easier to make worse than you think. In this episode, Ross and Will sit down with Dr. Greg Doctor, a wilderness medicine specialist and emergency physician practicing in the Colorado Rockies, to break down frostbite from the prehospital perspective. Greg walks through fie…

The contaminated airway is one of the most unforgiving calls in prehospital medicine. Blood, vomit, debris — your laryngoscope goes in and you're blind. For decades, paramedics managed this with tools designed for a clean OR and training that never got close to the real thing. Dr. Jim DuCanto decided that was unaccep…

What if the mistake wasn't your fault... but it's still your responsibility? That's the tension Shay Montgomery sits with every time she talks about the day she flew to a scene without the drug bag. Shay is a flight nurse and educator. At FAST 25, she gave one of the sharpest talks of the conference — not on a proced…

Miss your first intubation attempt and your patient's risk of adverse events jumps sevenfold. By the third attempt? Nearly guaranteed complications. This isn't about your anatomical knowledge or practice hours—expert clinicians fail too. David Olvera, who led national research on intubation checklists, reveals why you…

Behind the curve. We've all heard it. Most of us have lived it. That sinking feeling when you're mentally three steps behind where the call actually is. The concept of the Power Curve comes from aviation—pilots need to understand the phases of flight and how the plane will react differently and require different input…

You're not making mistakes because you're dumb. You're making mistakes because of seven predictable factors—and once you know them, you can control them. Kris Kaull delivered a masterclass at FASTCAN on the hidden forces that cause even experienced paramedics to miss critical information when it matters most. This is…

This episode tells the tragic story of Max McKenzie, a teenager with asthma who died from anaphylaxis despite receiving "standard care." His death led his father, Dr. Ben McKenzie, to develop the AMAX4 algorithm. Educator and critical care transport nurse/paramedic Bruce Hoffman breaks down the algorithm and explains…

Struggling to remember every protocol in high-pressure medical situations? You're not alone—and memorizing everything isn't the answer.   Join us for this game-changing conversation with Jean Francois Couture, co-founder of Parys Medical, as we unpack the science of habit formation for EMS and healthcare providers.…