iiSES brings together emergency services personnel from Australia, Canada, and the United States, with additional representation anticipated from the Republic of Ireland and the People’s Republic of China.

The clinical sustainability of EMS has been well-established over the last decades, especially with the confirmation of EMS as the newest physician medical subspecialty by the American Board of Medical Specialties. iiSES approaches other elements of sustainability in Emergency Services, including environmental sustainability, economic sustainability, and workforce sustainability.

“A major goal of iiSES is to raise awareness of the issues in maintaining many of our ‘high performance’ systems in light of increasing population size, population aging, increasing coverage area size, congested road networks, unstable energy supplies and fuel prices, increasing attention to carbon footprint, and employee burnout, fatigue and injury – to name but a few issues,” says Ian Blanchard, an iiSES board member from the University of Calgary, Canada.

iiSES will begin by highlighting the few empirical studies tackling issues of EMS sustainability, and promoting future research and publications. Once a body of evidence-based and consensus opinion literature has been established, it will begin developing best practices and position papers on sustainability issues.

“Currently, there are relatively few sustainability performance measures currently accepted in the EMS industry,” says founder Seth Hawkins, an emergency physician in North Carolina (USA) specializing in EMS and wilderness medicine. “We aim to challenge the idea that short-term emergency services and long-term sustainability are incompatible or mutually irrelevant. In fact, sustainability might be the most important unifying concept for Emergency Services management in the 21st century.”