The Cole County EMS training officer brings experience from military service to his new position.
Chris Pennington came to the service in January after retiring from the U.S. Air Force in Spokane, Washington. A native of Northwest Arkansas, Pennington said working in the Jefferson City area was a good fit for him as he has relatives in Columbia.
As training officer, Pennington has to manage both orientation training for the newly hired members of the EMS staff and providing the continuing education training the entire staff needs.
“We offer a multitude of opportunities for our staff to be able to conduct training so they can advance throughout the organization and their career,” he said.
Pennington said those who work in the EMS field have to do some sort of training every day.
“There’s a lot of growth in our service right now,” he said “We are rolling out a lot of new equipment. Cole County EMS is progressive because, for an agency of this size, we have a lot of modern/leading edge equipment to work with.”
Pennington said EMS staff has trained to operate monitors and ventilators that most regions don’t carry.
“We have advanced critical care ventilators on all our advanced life support trucks, which you don’t find in many places,” he said. “We just upgraded our infusion pumps to allow us to better utilize the medicines we deal with daily but also medicines used on inter-facility transports.”
As with all aspects of society, dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic brought changes in how things were done by the EMS service. Pennington said thanks to federal COVID relief monies, the service got medical manikins that allow their crews, both new and veteran, to go through scenarios before they go out and have to care for potential COVID patients.
“They can practice how to properly put on their personal protective equipment and then have the manikins mimic a patient with either minimal to severe COVID symptoms,” he said. “That allows us to have our staff run the entire plane of medical care we have available and see how a patient could react to that treatment. They can see if what they’re doing is right or reconsider something else if it isn’t going the way they’d planned.”
It’s always busy at an EMS service, and COVID made things even busier. With that in mind, Pennington said they’ve emphasized to their crews to try and take time for self-care.
“Knock out station chores so that way the rest of your shift, when you’re not out on calls, is your time,” he said. “Read, talk to people and don’t hide your feelings. I try to be a set of ears if they need it. Sometimes, they don’t need feedback, they just someone to listen to them. We face a lot of different emergencies, every day, not just COVID.”