• ⇤
• ⇽
• ≡
• ⇾
• ⇥

rushed to the hospital by an EMS under threat

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Last night my son had an attack of croup and needed some swift help from my inhaler and (more importantly) the city's EMS to survive.

It was touch and go, and terrifying. Happily, we were prepared as it turned out. We've retained an otherwise useless home phone (a real, old-fashioned POTS) for 9-11 calls, and as I happen to be asthmatic I had my inhaler readily at hand.

But it was the EMS folk who did all of the real work. While we were riding to the hospital in the ambulance I was chatting with one of the paramedics. I asked about our mayor's plans to integrate the paramedics with the firefighters. He confirmed that the mayor is still pushing the idea as a "cost saving" measure despite the fact that the city is currently in surplus. The enabling idea here is that firefighters would, in some fashion, take on the role of paramedics to some extent.

This means, among other things, that our paramedics don't know what's to become of their service, nor the standards to which they're trained and equipped. To get an idea of the extent of the problem, I'd told one of the firefighters that responded to our 9-11 call that I was asthmatic. He didn't know the word. Firefighters are selected not for capacity for many countless hours of study that a paramedic must constantly pursue to keep current, but for their capacity for endurance, strength, their understanding of structural response to fire, hazardous materials, and a host of things that are very different from the world of paramedics.

In short, I can't see how either specialized professional could function in the other's area. I'm largely ignorant of both, but I think this is our dullard mayor's worst idea. This stuff matters in the here and now, not just in some theoretical "cost effectiveness" sound bite shtick.