OUR TEAM (AND A NOTE ON ANONYMITY)
The Massachusetts Prehospital Coalition is led by an eight-member Executive Committee and a 16-member Delegate Committee, with active recruitment for additional delegates underway. Our leadership committees includes paramedics, AEMTs, EMTs, and physicians from private, hospital-based, fire-based, nonprofit, and municipal EMS agencies. Among our members are educators, EMS administrators, physicians, flight medics, and military veterans.
We want to put our names to this work. We believe in it, we stand behind every word, and we would much rather speak openly as the clinicians who live these problems every day.
For now, we cannot.
In the current climate, putting our names at the head of a movement that challenges the system puts our jobs, our licenses, and our futures at risk.
We have legitimate concerns about retaliation from private employers, the Massachusetts Office of Emergency Medical Services, and from the Medical Services Committee, the bodies that control our ability to practice and, for many of us, our livelihoods.
Several of our members are also applying to medical school, PA school, and residency programs in emergency medicine and trauma surgery. For them, a single negative reference or licensing complaint could end a career before it begins.
Some will ask how they can back a movement, whose members will not name themselves publicly.
It’s a fair question, and we’ve asked it ourselves. Courage isn’t the issue. Some of us have served on the busiest 911 trucks in the state, combat zones, and on flight crews. By organizing at all, each one of the members of the Steering Committee is already putting their license and perhaps their job on the line. But taking a risk is not the same as being reckless. We owe it to our members, our families, and our patients to limit that risk wherever we can. We won’t gamble our licenses, our careers, and our patients’ access to experienced clinicians on the hope that the system will treat dissent fairly.
The fact that we must hide our names to advocate for patient safety tells you everything about why this Coalition exists. A system cannot improve when the people closest to patient care are afraid to speak about it. Massachusetts EMS has yet to embrace a just culture.
The issues we raise touch on financial conflicts of interest, the growing role of private equity in healthcare, and the politics of public safety and healthcare in Massachusetts.
Challenging them will meet resistance. We will be disruptive. But we will also be diplomatic and professional.
We will not be drawn into personal or political fights. Instead, we will make the clinical case: what the evidence shows, what our patients need, and what threatens the safety of every resident and visitor of the Commonwealth.
Every member’s identity and credentials are known to the Coalition and can be verified confidentially by partner organizations and legislators.
Our anonymity is also temporary.
One EMS provider who speaks up can be singled out. A dozen can be ignored. But hundreds can’t be silenced, and thousands can’t be stopped.
There are tens of thousands of us across the Commonwealth: EMTs, AEMTs, paramedics, firefighters, emergency nurses, PAs, NPs, and physicians.
They can come after one of us. But they cannot come after all of us.
We’re not asking you to trust strangers. We’re asking you to stand with an argument, and to help make it safe enough that none of us has to hide. Every person who signs our petition, joins a meeting, or shares our work brings us closer to the day no provider in Massachusetts has to choose between their career and their patients. We believe we are on the right side of history for Massachusetts EMS, and we look forward to the day we can say so under our own names.
Signed,
The Massachusetts Paramedic Coalition Steering Committee
XXX XXX, NR-P, CCP-C (Private EMS)
XXX XXX, NR-P, CCP-C (Hospital-based EMS)
XXX XXX, NR-P, CP-C (Public, 3rd Service EMS)
XXX XXX, FF, NR-P (Fire-based EMS, Military Veteran)
XXX XXX, FF, NR-P (Fire-based EMS)
XXX XXX, NR-P (Private EMS)
XXX XXX, NR-P, FP-C (Public EMS, Former Private EMS, Military Veteran)
XXX XXX, NR-P (Public, 3rd Service EMS)