StraightAhead

I’m on a small fire department as some of you may know. I began on a large 1500 man fully paid fire department. The one I am on now has 13 career firemen and about 100 volunteers. The first 10 or 15 years of my fire career was a time when the fire side of departments and the medical/ambulance side of fire departments was pretty much separated. We were in the house with the “ems people” but they manned the ambulances at all times. Never did any of the “fire” personnel move from their fire apparatus to work the day on the ambulance. We liked that just fine, we had signed up to be fire fighters. Those early drivers were great at basic life support techniques but basically would try and stabilize the patient enough to take off to the hospital as quickly as possible. Sadly, the ambulances were referred to as meat wagons quite often, because they were basically a means of transport to the hospital e.r. Sometime in the late 70′s all that started to change. ems people were being further educated to have more skills such as starting iv’s and being able to intubate(oxygen tube to the lungs) Not long after these changes were taking place there was a move to educate all fire fighters so that they would have medical training and be able to eventually function on the ems side of fire Departments. I would guess around the middle 80′s this process started. Now virtually all, if not all Fire Departments have as a pre requisite that you be medically trained(have at least an emt certificate)before you can be hired as a firefighter on their department and large fire departments put you through their own fire school and you come out of there either as an emt or paramedic. Many of the old school firefighters were drug into this era kicking and screaming and many of them just retired or quit. I know in my small town at least two of the former career firemen quit when we were forced to take a 40 hour eca course and become “first responders” in January of 2004. I had mixed feelings about it, but I wasn’t ready to retire and sort of looked forward to learning something new. First of all, being a first responder fire dept. means that fire personnel(in fire trucks, etc.)go out on ems calls when the ambulance gets the call. On my fire dept. We don’t make all ems calls but make calls based on criteria that have been set out before hand. In a nut shell, we make all the more serious heart calls, infant calls, difficulty or not breathing calls and a few more. Until the dispatchers got this straight, in the beginning, we were making all calls. That got old fast. Things have calmed down quite a bit and are as they should be now, more or less. The other half of this story will be upcoming.