08/20/2026
We are incredibly fortunate to have members of our EMS family willing to take time away from their lives to attend the KEMSA Conference! 🚑
Amber, Thomas, and Bobby attended this year’s conference to learn, grow, and bring new ideas and resources back to our service and the Mitchell County community.
We are proud of their dedication to continuing education and to providing the best care possible for those we serve!
Here are some of their biggest takeaways! 👇
Amber:
“The 2026 KEMSA Conference in Manhattan was such a great opportunity to learn, connect with other EMS professionals, and bring new ideas back to our service. One of my biggest takeaways was just how important continuing education, staying up to date with evidence-based patient care, and strong teamwork and communication are in EMS. It was also a great reminder that rural EMS faces a lot of the same challenges across the state, and there is so much we can learn from each other by sharing ideas and experiences. Overall, I left the conference with a lot of new knowledge, ideas, and motivation to continue finding ways to improve the care we provide to our communities.”
Bobby:
“Had a great weekend at my first Kansas EMS Association Conference learning value lessons from The EMS Avenger Jimmy Apple, Chris Way from Charleston EMS, The Salty Paramedic, and many more great speakers. So many good nuggets to bring back and implement in our Rural EMS system as a provider and as a leader that I’m excited to bring back to my team.
I truly got the most out of the session titled “Putting the M back in EMS” taught by Chris Way. He covers an area of 1,450 square miles! One of the most important things he said is we cannot build an EMS system to match that of the another system - it won’t work! We don’t have the same demographics, equipment, certification levels, policies and protocols, etc. Do the work to determine what it is your community and local demographic requires of your service and build and adapt to that.
Another piece I took from his speech was in the way of personnel development. He said one of his favorite things to do is place 2 EMT’s on the same truck, let them use their skills to their full capacity and the ones that thrive become some of the best paramedics in his system. I made pages of notes that will take weeks to get thru but truly a valuable weekend.”
