For the last few years I have written my initial impressions of conferences in blog posts shortly after, or sometimes even during, a conference. The post “Quick Thoughts from the EMS Today 2012 Conference,” for instance, described my first EMS Today experience and captured the fact that I actually had the opportunity to give ‘two thumbs up‘ to my boyhood idle ‘Johnny Gage’ (aka Randolph Mantooth) among other professional icons. I also had the opportunity to ride along with a BCFD crew and documented that experience in the post “A Country EMS in the Big City” that year. The next year, I got to experience EMS Today in DC along with the much hyped ‘Snowquester‘ that abbreviated the EMS on the Hill advocacy opportunity, but where I did still get to witness a small ‘Gathering of Eagles‘ slaughtering a number of ‘sacred cows.’ A summary of that experience is recorded in the post “Quick Thoughts from EMS Today 2013 Conference.” Last year provided a very different perspective as I got to document EMS Today from the viewpoint of a pre-conference presenter and spent much of my time as an exhibitor on the show floor. One of my favorite learning experiences, however, was the ‘Resuscitation Academy‘. Some of my experience that year was covered in the post “Quick Thoughts from EMS Today 2014.” But this particular post is a unique first, as I am writing this time about a conference that hasn’t even happened yet – EMS Today 2015!
My interest in this coming conference is as a blog reporter. I hope to attend this conference as an official blogger tasked with documenting once again my experience as a participant in all of the fascinating aspects of this powerful and educationally-packed conference. If you are planning to attend the conference, we can help each other. Your registration using the code ‘EMSBDALE’ gets you a discount, even beyond the early bird discount rate, and provides a vote of confidence in me to be selected as the official blogger for this coming event. To make it an even better deal for you, each registration using my code will be entered into a drawing for a mini Apple iPad this month and another for anyone who enters my code during registration for January as well.
I hope that you do get to go to this keystone EMS event and that you will help me get there as well. If we do win, you will hear about it first on this blog page. PennWell and JEMS is working closer with its Fire EMS blog network than ever before in order to bring you a more intimate view of the conference and the larger industry of EMS as well through independent blogs, Facebook pages like High Performance EMS, and Twitter feeds including @hp_ems. So even if you don’t get to the 2015 EMS event of the year, you can still experience some of the excitement and continue to learn all throughout the year.