Instructor

Daniel Thomas

EMT, Firefighter

Instructor

13 years of experience.

Background

Daniel Thomas serves as an Emergency Medical Services Chief with 13 years of public safety experience across fire, emergency response, and EMS operations.

Daniel began his career in fire and emergency services, where he built hands-on experience in emergency response, incident management, and patient care. He holds Firefighter I certification along with advanced emergency response training, and has operated across the spectrum of fire and EMS work that defines suburban public safety: working calls as a provider, supervising scenes, and now leading operations as Chief.

His current role as EMS Chief carries responsibility for operational readiness, responder safety, training standards, and the day-to-day decisions that keep an EMS organization functioning. That role gives Daniel a working perspective on what it takes to maintain a ready, trained, and safe response posture, which is exactly the operational grounding PTS courses are built to develop in students.

For Penn Tactical Solutions students, Daniel brings the perspective of an active EMS Chief who has worked the call as a provider, managed the scene as a supervisor, and built the systems that keep responders trained and ready as a leader.

Specialties

Fire and Emergency Response Pre-Hospital Patient Care EMS Operations

Field Notes

The Calls Don't End When the Scene Clears: A Chief's Reflection on Mental Health in Fire and EMS

You can hear a bad call before you step out of the truck. You can hear it in dispatch's voice, feel it in the crew getting quiet, sense...

May 11, 2026

Connect

dthomas@avav48.org

Back to Our Team

The Calls Don't End When the Scene Clears: A Chief's Reflection on Mental Health in Fire and EMS

You can hear a bad call before you step out of the truck. You can hear it in dispatch's voice, feel it in the crew getting quiet, sense...

May 11, 2026