The Name on the Award Is Only Part of the Story

Editor's Note: Andrew Perry is the 2026 NAEMT EMT of the Year Award, sponsored by Demers-Braun-Crestline-Medix. He currently serves as an EMT in Marked Tree, Arkansas. Perry will be recognized in person during EMS World Expo, in partnership with NAEMT, on Wednesday, Sept. 30 during opening ceremonies. Learn more about additional 2026 National EMS Awards of Excellence winners.

There’s something uncomfortable about being recognized in EMS. Not bad uncomfortable. Just unfamiliar. We spend our careers walking into other people’s stories. The patient is the center of the room. The family is watching us. Our attention is on our partner, the monitor, the road ahead, the next decision. Then somebody hands you an award, says your name, and, just for a few minutes, asks you to stand in the center of the room instead.

I recently had that experience when I was named EMT of the Year. I am incredibly grateful for the honor. I don’t want humility to become a way of diminishing what it means, because it means a great deal to me. Someone believed the work I’ve done was worthy of recognition, and I will carry that with me for the rest of my career. But I’ve struggled with one part of it: How do you accept an individual award for a career that has never really been, and will never be, individual? I know whose name is on the award. I also know how many people it took to put it there.

The Work Nobody Sees

Very few people enter EMS expecting recognition. We certainly don’t enter it expecting to get rich. We come for different reasons. Some of us grew up around emergency services and fire departments. Some stumbled into EMT class without ever realizing it would change the entire direction of our lives. Some truly just wanted to serve their communities in the best way they could. Others simply figured out they were very good at being useful when things went wrong. Whatever brought us through the door, eventually we all learn the same lesson: Most of the work is done while nobody is watching.

There is no audience at 2:30 in the morning when you’re desperately trying to get someone onto the stretcher from the precarious position of being lodged between the bedroom wall and the bed. Nobody applauds the careful assessment that catches the one tiny thing that just didn’t look right. And there’s definitely no ceremony for sitting beside a terrified patient and explaining, one more time, what is about to happen. Most calls end much less dramatically. You and your partner clean the stretcher, replace what you used, finish the report, and maybe grab a bite to eat. Then the phone goes off again. That’s EMS. And that’s why receiving an award for doing it has made me think a lot more about recognition than I expected to. Not recognition for me, though. Recognition for us.

The Patients Who Built the Provider

If you spend enough years riding in an ambulance, eventually you realize your education never ended. I always tell ride-along students, and sometimes my patients, that the classroom provides the foundation. But our patients build on it. I’ve learned medicine from textbooks, continuing education, instructors, and experienced providers. But some of the most important lessons I’ve learned about EMS, and about life, have come from the people lying on my stretcher. Patients taught me that being technically correct is not enough. You can perform a perfect assessment and still fail someone if you never make them feel heard. You can know exactly what needs to happen medically while forgetting that the person in front of you may be experiencing all of this for the very first time. The call we consider routine may very well be the call they remember for the rest of their life.

That realization changes something in you. Over time, patients teach you when to explain more, when to stop talking, when humor might help, and when it absolutely won’t. They can also teach you the difference between when someone needs medicine and when someone just needs another human being to sit beside them and say, “I’ve got you.” Thousands of small interactions shape the provider you become. Most of those patients will never know they taught you anything. Mine certainly have. So, when I think about being recognized as an EMT, I can’t separate the provider being recognized from the patients who helped build him.

The Person in the Other Seat

Then there’s my partner. Anyone who has worked in EMS longer than five minutes will tell you how much weight that word carries.

A good EMS partnership develops its own language. Sometimes it’s clinical. Other times it can be nothing more than a glance. Sometimes it’s reaching for something before your partner asks because you’ve worked together long enough to understand the move they’re about to make. And sometimes partnership has nothing to do with medicine at all. There have been hundreds of gas station dinners and deep conversations at ridiculous hours. There are times when you know to talk after a difficult call and times when you know not to. There are times when you and your partner disagree, learn, and adjust together.

The partnership you develop in EMS is unlike almost any other relationship you will have. You have someone who sees the things no one else does. There are too many moments in this profession that are almost impossible to explain to someone who wasn’t there. Your partner was there. I’ve become a better provider because of the person working beside me. I’ve been challenged, supported, enraged, and elated. Sometimes all in the same hour. When I’ve doubted myself, I’ve had someone there who believed in me. When a call has been difficult, I haven’t carried it alone. And when something has gone well, there has been someone beside me who understands exactly what it took. An individual provider may receive recognition. Very little good EMS is actually practiced alone.

When the Service Area Is Home

I work for Riverside Ambulance, and serving a small community has shaped the way I understand EMS. In community EMS, the streets aren’t anonymous. They’re the same roads you drive when you’re off duty. The restaurants you pass are places you eat with your family. The schools belong to our children and our neighbors’ children. The person whose house you’re walking into may be someone you see in the grocery store next week. The coverage map may call it a service area. We call it home. That creates a different kind of responsibility. Riverside has given me opportunities to grow far beyond the EMT who first climbed into an ambulance so many years ago. I’ve been able to serve patients, advocate for EMS in our nation’s capital, speak about our profession, and discover that taking care of a community can happen in more places than the back of an ambulance. But everything still comes back to the same basic promise: When someone calls, we go.

That’s what community EMS is built on. Trust. The public trusts that an ambulance will come down that road when they need one. They trust that the people stepping through their doorway will know what to do and know how to handle whatever may come. Being worthy of that trust means more to me than being worthy of an award.

The Teacher Who Started It All

There’s one more person I think about when I look at this recognition. My EMT instructor. Every EMS career begins somewhere. Before you ever work your first cardiac arrest, your first trauma patient, or have your first moment of wondering whether you’re actually cut out for this, somebody has to teach you how to start. We remember the skills: airways, assessments, trauma, medical emergencies, vital signs, patient movement.

We remember all of that. But the best instructors teach something that isn’t easily measured on any exam. They teach you what kind of provider you should become. An instructor sees you before you have experience or stories to tell. Definitely before you have confidence. They see the possibility of the provider you might become. My EMT instructor, Steven Brown, helped build the foundation underneath everything that followed in my career. I hope every EMS educator understands the reach of that work. A student eventually leaves the classroom. A teacher’s influence doesn’t. It rides the ambulance with them for years.

Recognition is an Obligation

I’ve spent some time thinking about what I’m supposed to do with the words “EMT of the Year.” I’ve decided I don’t want to treat them as a finish line. I’d rather treat them as an obligation. An obligation to keep learning. To keep showing up. To keep advocating. To keep treating the so-called “routine” call like it isn’t routine to the person who dialed 9-1-1. To remember what it felt like to be the new EMT who wasn’t completely sure he belonged there yet. And, when I have the opportunity, to be the person who tells that EMT, “You can do this.”

Maybe that’s the real value of recognition in EMS. An award can have one person’s name on it while still shining a light on thousands of people doing the same work without one. The EMT finishing another long shift. The paramedic carrying 20 years of calls nobody else knows about. The rural ambulance service stretching limited resources to keep a truck available for its community. The instructor staying late because one student still doesn’t understand cardiology. The person sitting in the other seat of the ambulance. The families who understand why “I’ll be home soon” is sometimes an insanely optimistic thing to say. And, most of all, the patients who trust us before they even know our names. Those people are EMS.

I am proud to be named EMT of the Year. I can say that now without feeling like I need to immediately apologize for being proud. I’m grateful for it. I’m humbled by it. And I hope I spend the rest of my career being worthy of it. But when I think about the award, I don’t think about one EMT. I think about the community that trusted me. The patients who taught me and continue to teach me every day. The partner who sits beside me. My family who encourages me. My instructor who gave me a foundation. And my service, which gave me a place to call home. That’s the strange thing about individual recognition in EMS. By the time your name ends up on an award, your career is already covered in everyone else’s fingerprints.

Maybe that’s why this one means so much to me. My name may be the one engraved on it. But the story behind that name was written by a whole lot of people.