Emergency Medicine Chief Resident Wins National EMS Award

Woods Curry, MD, a chief resident for the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Cincinnati (UC) College of Medicine, is continuing what is becoming a tradition in the department. By winning the 2016 Jean Hollister Emergency Medical Services (EMS) Award, he becomes the fourth winner in the last six years to be from UC.

The Jean Hollister EMS Award, which dates back to 1986, is given out by the Emergency Medicine Residents' Association to the nominee who has made valuable contributions to prehospital care and EMS services. The nominees are judged by their work in the areas of operational leadership, service and research.

Curry was nominated for the award by Jason McMullan, MD, associate professor of emergency medicine in the UC College of Medicine. "Of all the residents I have mentored through the research process, Dr. Curry stands out in his ability to set and meet deadlines, troubleshoot and resolve the issues that always arise, and motivate those around him to produce quality, timely work," McMullan says. "He is a novice to the process, but has performed far better than I expect from those with more experience."

For the last three years, Curry has demonstrated operational leadership while serving as an assistant medical director for the City of Reading and the Village of Evendale. "We do their medical directorship, which includes all their continuing education," Curry says. "We also do quality review and serve as their medical directors for questions and comments and someone to bounce things off of."

Curry met the service component of the award process by providing prehospital care as a flight physician on Air Care. When not flying to and from trauma scenes, Curry and his Air Care colleagues also perform outreach in the EMS community. They give continuing education lectures for some of the outlying EMS agencies that don't have active medical directors.

Curry is also part of a team of researchers that just completed the study "Mechanical Ventilation of Severe Traumatic Brain Injury Patients in the Prehospital Setting." The research looked at whether there were differences between putting patients on a ventilator or manually bagging them to assist their breathing. Dr. Curry is presenting this work at the upcoming Society for Academic Emergency Medicine annual meeting in New Orleans.

"We weren't able to demonstrate a significant difference between the two groups," Curry says. "We know anecdotally that the ventilator gives better breath consistency, and it frees up a pair of hands in the back of the helicopter to do some other task. We hoped to be able to prove that it was better than manually bagging, but we weren't able to prove that in this study."

Curry says he was excited, honored and humbled when he got the email informing him that he won the award. "I think that me winning this award, and someone from UC winning four out of the last six years is a reflection less on the work that I've done and more on the opportunities that our department gives for residents in EMS and prehospital care."

His residency is coming to an end this summer and he will spend the next year in the Department of Emergency Medicine completing a fellowship in EMS Medicine. He says he will use the year to get a better idea of what he wants to do with his career. One thing he knows for sure is that he will always serve in some capacity as an emergency medical physician.

"I became an assistant medical director for a lot of different reasons and it was through that work that I realized this was really rewarding," he says. "In the emergency department I can touch the lives of 30 or 40 patients a day and over the course of a career that's a lot of people, but it's still a limited number. As a medical director, if I write an EMS protocol, or change the way all my paramedics practice in a certain way, that can help thousands of lives a year."