Keynotes & General Sessions

We enter emergency services committed to making a difference. How does that commitment gradually become doing just enough to get by? Small shortcuts become habits, lowered expectations become accepted standards, and “good enough” becomes the way we work.

Inspiring and practical, Rom Duckworth explores how individuals and organizations drift from excellence, and how to find their way back. Through reflection and examples from emergency services, participants reconnect with the purpose behind their work and identify ways to strengthen professional development, accountability, and mastery. Excellence does not require perfection. It requires maintaining standards, learning from mistakes, and accepting responsibility for getting better.

We measure our work in calls answered, problems solved, and lives saved. But what happens when the outcome is beyond our control, or when the challenges facing our profession seem bigger than anything one person can change? The value of our service reaches beyond a single outcome, and our ability to move forward depends on the strength we build together.

Through personal stories, humor, and practical examples, Rom Duckworth explores the difference we make for patients, families, communities, and one another. This keynote challenges emergency service professionals to look beyond rank, role, and organizational boundaries, remain students of their craft, and turn shared knowledge into meaningful improvement. Participants will reconnect with the purpose of their work and recognize their own responsibility, and capacity, to help shape its future. No one has every answer. Each of us has something to contribute.

Delivering emergency services is so much more than simply showing up for calls. Working emergency services can demand literal blood, sweat, and tears. We work hard to gain skill, experience, and understanding through our careers, all while roadblocks challenge us and make it easy to lose our way. Opportunities to make a significant difference in the lives of others above and beyond 911 response can easily slip past as our systems struggle to keep up with the pressures of emergency calls. When we feel like we've run out of perspiration, where can we look for our inspiration? In this humorous, passionate, and insightful presentation, Rom’s stories shine a light on ways that we can keep our heads, hearts, and hands all pulling in the same direction, even by the side of the road at 3 am on a dark and stormy night.

We can learn a lot about ourselves by observing nature. The parallels between the work of a beehive and the work of emergency services are astounding. Bees have an organization with an overall goal achieved by selfless individuals, each with a specific job to do. As in emergency services, every hive has rank and structure, discipline and seniority, leadership, and field work, all pulling together for the community. See what the bees can teach us about ourselves and the work that we do.

Students. Dispatchers. Bystanders. Our partners. Our patients. Their families. We will have many intense and impressionable encounters with many different people throughout our careers, but do we understand what they will recall and share with others the next day? What about 5, 10, 20 years down the road? We leave a legacy with our actions, but is it the legacy we intend? Sometimes strange, sometimes funny, always insightful and inspirational, Rom Duckworth uses his experience and expertise as a lens through which we can explore the effects we have and the impressions we leave on others. Those with whom we work and those we serve: find out what the one thing is they'll remember about us.

Attending a class or presentation may leave you motivated, educated, and entertained, but you may wonder what difference it will ultimately make to our work in the “real world.” To put theory into practice, we have to be intelligent, inspired, and influential. This presentation poises us to take the knowledge, enthusiasm, and resources that we have now, bring them home to our own agencies, and effect change in a way that’s meaningful to our membership and to those who call upon us in their time of crisis.

What stories do you tell about emergency services? What stories make us laugh? What stories teach us? What stories bring us closer together? The history of every organization is, or should be, shared through stories. Some are told to inspire, while others serve as a warning. Sharing some of his own stories, Rom Duckworth asks us to think about the stories we share, the stories we’ve shaped, and the stories others will tell about us when we’ve gone.

While many are aware that Franklin organized Philadelphia's first volunteer fire company, fewer know that Franklin also cofounded America's first hospital. Franklin’s interest in building and protecting strong communities has left us with many lessons to inspire and guide fire, rescue, and EMS leaders in the twenty-first century. His advice is as applicable to emergency responders today as it was to its hard-working readers of the eighteenth century. Perhaps America's most beloved founding father, Ben Franklin's timeless wisdom is as relevant to emergency responders today as when he started publishing Poor Richard's Almanack more than 280 years ago.