Firefighters and paramedics tend to a hiker who fell 75 feet into a ravine in Naples, N.Y., Sunday. The 62-year-old victim was flown to the hospital in critical condition by Mercy Flight of Western N.Y. (Photo John Spaulding)
Reconciling the disparity in the respective roles of fire suppression and EMS first require that we gain a greater understanding of those roles. Paramedicine and firefighting are two fundamentally different things — not worse or better, but different.
A paramedic was acting according to his training when he moved on to help other victims of a car accident without checking vital signs of a woman who appeared dead but was actually alive, a San Antonio firefighters association official said.
Saving the living has always been the No. 1 priority for a New York City ambulance crew. But a select group of paramedics may soon have a different task altogether: saving the dead. The city is considering creating a special ambulance whose crew would rush to collect the newly deceased and preserve the body so that the organs might be taken for transplant.
