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California EMT and Paramedic Careers - CA
By an allied health world contributing writerPublished: January 29th, 2010
California has a long history of emergency medical services (EMS) that varies widely from city to city. Today, the entire system is suffering from the shutdowns and budget cuts plaguing the Golden State, but the demand for quality medical professionals remains the same. A few examples of city history are noted here.
The City of San Diego is proud of its EMS team and recalls its long past on its website. Before 1970, police offers transported patients in station wagons converted to hold basic medical supplies, with the main task being to get the patient to a hospital as quickly as possible in what was known as a "scoop and haul" procedure. By 1972, San Diego County was chosen by the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare as one of five areas in the United States to demonstrate the viability of a new EMS system. Seven years later, San Diego was offering professional EMS services through an ambulance firm and the city's fire department also offered first responder services in certain parts of the city.
In 1980, the fire department trained all its fire fighters as Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs) and became one of the nation's first groups to acquire dispatch training in 911 triage and pre-arrival instructions. In 1997, to alleviate problems with private paramedic firms, San Diego redesigned its EMS delivery system and ensured that each of the 46 fire stations had a firefighter/paramedic available.
Santa Barbara County EMS got off to an inauspicious start in 1978 when no ambulance company responded to a request to provide countywide services. The California EMT training and paramedic training in California are an important first step of a job in this field.
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