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Thursday, May 31, 2007

Arizona

I wrote briefly a few days ago about my trip to Arizona. I did get a chance to talk to some EMS providers and also got a tour of Southwest Ambulance's headquarters in Mesa, Arizona. The tour of Southwest was a real eye-opener for an EMT that runs in rural New England.

The crew pictured above were nice enough to talk to me about what they do. They are an RN and EMT-P and they run together as a Critical Care team. They had just finished their rig-check and were checking and signing for their drug box when I first met them. Their ALS box was a whole lot bigger than what I carry as an EMT-I here in VT! We talked about our respective scopes of practice; they were shocked that we have no paramedics in my VT district. Thank you to everyone I met at Southwest, especially Ms. Sandy Nygaard who took over an hour out of her busy day to show me around.

I also got to talk to a crew from another ambulance company, PMT. I saw their ambulance parked outside of one of their satellite headquarters, and just walked in. The crew was made up of a paramedic and an EMT-B. We talked about their service area and I was a little surprised to find that EMS in the definitely urban City of Scottsdale, AZ has a lot of similarities to what we do here in rural VT. They have multiple nursing homes in their area and are called to them frequently. One of them even made a comment about not having a highway in their service area (it is served by another service), and thus they got to go to relatively few 10-50s. Sounds familiar!


I tried to stay aware to what was happening around me as I spent several days touring the area. I did see several working scenes that I would have loved to be a part of. The opportunities for a career EMT are plentiful, and the weather....hot and sunny everyday. Hmm......


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