Liz Harney on the human side of EMS

This week on EMS One-Stop, I sit down with Liz Harney, almost a year after I first walked into a classroom at EMS World Expo looking for another session to report on and found what I later described as “the keynote I didn’t know I needed.” Liz’s presentation was built around a part of EMS education we routinely acknowledge but rarely give equal billing: the affective domain — empathy, communication, professionalism, self-awareness and the ability to connect with another human being in what may be the worst moment of their life. But the real power came from Liz herself. Before she was a paramedic, educator and EMS leader, she was the patient. At the lowest point of a decade-long struggle with addiction, one paramedic looked beyond the overdose, the circumstances and the judgement, and treated her as a person who still mattered. Liz credits that interaction not simply with helping save her clinically, but with changing the trajectory of her life. She recovered, entered EMS and ultimately became the kind of paramedic she had encountered that day. It is a remarkable journey from patient to paramedic, and in this conversation, Liz explains why that experience now sits at the heart of everything she teaches about the human side of EMS. | MORE: Liz Harney — the affective domain is the heart of EMS, so why aren’t we teaching it? Our discussion also catches up with where Liz’s thinking has evolved since. In her recent EMS1 article, “Shiny Happy People,” she takes that same belief in people and applies it to EMS leadership, challenging professionals that is exceptionally good at identifying everything that might go wrong not to let that instinct extinguish every new idea before it gets moving. Together, we connect those themes: the provider who changed one patient’s life, the importance of deliberately teaching the affective domain, turning cynics into champions, recognizing burnout through QA and QI, and creating leadership teams with enough optimism and emotional intelligence (EI) to make change happen. At a time when EMS is increasingly consumed by another form of intelligence (AI), the conversation comes back to a proposition I think matters more and more: if we are going to get good at AI, we first need to get much better at EI. Additional resources: Liz Harney: Shiny happy people. The leadership power of optimism Rob Lawrence: The affective domain is the heart of EMS — so why aren’t we teaching it? Inside EMS: Tactical empathy: The leadership tool you’re not using enough Colby Davis: Can emotional intelligence be taught? Shannon L. Gollnick: The paradox of progress — emotional intelligence as the differentiator in an AI-augmented workforce Key quotes “It truly was a paramedic that not only saved me in a clinical sense, but she saved me in a human sense.” — Liz Harney “Everybody has a story and they’re all a little the same, but they’re all very different at the same time.” — Liz Harney “It’s our role as educators and program directors to be able to ensure that we are instilling, improving the affective domain, just as we are the cognitive and the psychomotor.” — Liz Harney “You created from the cynic, turned them into the champion, and then the champion then took that back to their own service.” — Rob Lawrence “I am the dreamer, probably because I have forged myself out of the depths of hell.” — Liz Harney “Look at me, anything is possible. Like there is never a ‘no’ in my language.” — Liz Harney “In order to build, in order to make change, in order to move the needle, you have to have folks that are strong in EI to make that happen.” — Liz Harney “There’s always room for improvement.” — Liz Harney “I may not be able to teach everyone to care, but I absolutely think you can teach people what caring looks like in practice.” — Liz Harney “No one’s ever complained about the gauge of needle that we used, but they’ve certainly complained that the me