Homegrown Heroes: How New Orleans EMS is Recruiting and Training Providers From Within the Community We Serve

New Orleans EMS has faced staffing challenges like EMS agencies across the nation. To meet the rising demand, we, like other agencies, have turned to recruiting and training providers from within the community we serve. In the spirit of RND, "rip off and duplicate" we found and partnered with EMS Corps to implement their best practices into our first ever NOEMS Recruit Academy. Join us as we share our experience from initial research and development, through procuring funding and contracting, and into implementation. We'll share our experiences blending flipped classroom EMT curriculum with agency and NAEMT curriculum. As a municipal agency we'll share tips and tricks for developing new Civil Service positions and hiring processes as well as engaging with nonprofit partners. As a public service facing revenue challenges, we'll discuss our initial and sustainability funding sources to keep this effort going. We benefited from the support provided by our partners and wish to pay this forward to better EMS services anywhere we can.