This is a guest post by Jason Friesen, President/Founder of Trek Medics International. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here . About two years ago, I really got interested in learning about how EMS worked in foreign countries – particularly in low- and middle-income countries – and as I began my research I quickly found that there wasn’t too much information available, and what little information that did exist was scattered, incomplete or tucked away inside other research articles. Little by little, however, I started compiling a small collection of articles and internet sites on different systems. One of the places that provided a lot of great information was the World Health Organization (WHO), who had published a paper in 2005 entitled, “ Prehospital Trauma Care Systems .” This paper was part of a greater effort by the WHO to address the rapidly growing problem of preventable death and disability in low- to middle-income countries. As a result of reading this paper, as well as others published by WHO”s Department of Violence and Injury Prevention , I discovered that there was in fact a significant amount of work being done to build a framework supporting prehospital system development across the globe, whether formal or informal. After that, it simply became a game of connecting the dots by using PubMed to do searches on the cited references from the articles to find more articles on the topic. It didn’t take long after that to realize that I had a small library of information that hadn’t been put together anywhere else, so I decided to do something with it. In the end, I started the DIEMS Project (Database for International EMS Systems) , whose basic idea was to provide something that didn’t previously exist – a resource for prehospital providers interested in international EMS efforts. At the moment, it’s up to 26 countries, though I will be adding more in the next couple months and continue to add countries as I find more information. And while I wouldn’t want to dictate how the information I’ve collected should be used, I do have a couple ideas of how it might help EMS professionals further their career. Expand and enhance career opportunities for EMS professionals. I was once told that there were only four career opportunities for EMS professionals beyond the ambulance: the fire department, nursing, management or burn-out. While that definitely seems to have been the case in the past, I’m convinced that the future holds a lot of new, exciting opportunities for EMS professionals, but only if we are able to identify them, and then take hold of them. As I mentioned above, prehospital systems are becoming a real big focus within the WHO. Morbidity and mortality from injuries is just this huge, growing menace in a globalizing world, and it tends to be most prevalent among young males – who also happen to be the economic base within any country. The emotional, societal and financial burdens placed upon a community by death and permanent disability is a huge impediment on a developing country’s progress. But whereas injury used to be considered the result of “accidents”, public health experts are now working to reverse this fatalistic approach and demonstrate how most of these injuries are preventable, and that the real accident is when a person actually dies from injuries that shouldn’t necessarily be fatal

Original Source of Tips for Using the Database for International EMS Systems