Ambulance services are crucial to the proper functioning of every community. Without ambulance services, people would not receive urgent healthcare when they needed it. An ambulance service provides immediate transportation to hospitals and other healthcare facilities, offering other critical on-call services to the community.
Maxim Gorin, an critical care transport service founder, and CEO, explains why these services are essential for every community and how local areas could be affected without these vital services.
The Role of Ambulance Services
The first responsibility of an ambulance service is providing emergency care by triaging, stabilizing, and expediting safe transport of the patient on the way to the hospital. Ambulances respond to 911 calls and summons from other first responders like police and fire dispatchers.
Ambulance services provide patients with easy access to emergence care or critical care transport (CCT), especially after hours when the patient’s primary care doctor may not be available. The ambulance service deals with patients on the front lines, assessing emergent problems and helping to funnel them to the proper avenues of care.
Ambulance teams are highly skilled and equipped to provide expertise in the emergency evaluation of patients with various acute healthcare issues.
Trained Teams of Professionals
From the dispatchers to the EMTs and paramedics delivering care, everyone on the team is a skilled professional that responds rapidly and accurately to challenges. During an ordinary day, EMTs and paramedics face many challenging medical situations.
Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs) are the entry-level personnel who are present on most ambulance crews. An EMT has at least 170 hours of training as well as on-the-job education.
EMTs are capable of assessing a patient’s condition, providing first aid, and providing life support to injured or ill patients. EMTs can give CPR, emergency glucose, and oxygen, among many other duties.
Many EMTs eventually go on to become advanced EMTs or paramedics. Becoming a paramedic involves 1,200 to 1,800 hours of education which may take up to 12 months.
Paramedics can administer medications, provide airway management, interpret EKGs, and start intravenous lines. They have more advanced medical skills than EMTs, but like the EMT, their primary mission is to stabilize the patient for their ride to the hospital, where they will receive further treatment.
The Importance of Ambulance Service in the Community
Without an ambulance service at the ready, many patients may not survive critical care events like heart attacks, stroke, and catastrophic accidents. In many rural areas around the country, EMS services are experiencing severe staff shortages. Some places do not have dedicated emergency ambulances, so they are covered by geographically distant companies. This means that the response times are longer, and vital life-saving services may be significantly delayed.
Supporting Ambulance Services
Local communities should support their EMS ambulances and ensure that they have adequate funding and are well-trained at all times. Without these services, public health and safety could be seriously impacted.
Max Gorin believes that ambulance services fulfill a significant role within the community. The absence of these services in rural and underserved areas could lead to disaster, especially as the Covid pandemic continues its firm hold across the United States.
Providing a Crucial Community Service
Ambulance services help to preserve the health of the community. These services ensure that residents who need immediate help are met with a fast response to emergent and acute situations. As an emergency medical service leader, Maxim Gorin understands how his industry helps the community and fits into the overall healthcare picture.
Whether privately run or publicly funded, ambulance services should be supported because our cities would lose the vital ability to care for their communities without EMS transport.
