Seattle & King County Emergency Medical Services System
The Seattle & King County Emergency Medical Services System is a fire-based two-tier response system providing prehospital basic and advanced life support services.
There are six paramedic provider programs in the system. The Seattle Fire Department operates Seattle Medic One. The program is funded by the city's general fund and has a different administrative structure than the five other Medic One programs. The five other Medic One programs with the exception of King County Medic One are operated by fire departments under a formal contract with the EMS Division of Public Health - Seattle & King County. King County Medic One is directly operated by the EMS Division.
The modern EMS system in King County began operation in 1970 with 15 paramedics staffing one paramedic unit in Seattle. In 2009 there are 255 paramedics from six paramedic programs staffing 26 paramedic units.
The system is a dynamic layered response system. An EMS response to an emergency begins with a telephone call to 9-1-1. Calls are transferred from a primary call taker to emergency medical call taker who gathers information from the caller, gives instructions to the caller, and determines what types of emergency personnel to send. For very serious and life threatening emergencies firefighters trained in basic life support and paramedics trained in advanced life support respond simultaneously. Paramedics transport patients in critical condition. For less severe emergencies only firefighters will be dispatched. Basic life support personnel from either a fire department or private ambulance company transport non-critical patients.
Read more about Seattle & King County Emergency Medical Services System: History, Programs, Structure, Funding, Research
Famous quotes containing the words seattle, king, county, emergency, medical, services and/or system:
“If I’d written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people—including me—would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.”
—Hunter S. Thompson (b. 1939)
“The actor is too prone to exaggerate his powers; he wants to play Hamlet when his appearance is more suitable to King Lear.”
—Sarah Bernhardt (1845–1923)
“In the County Tyrone, in the town of Dungannon,”
—Unknown. The Old Orange Flute (l. 1)
“War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view “realistically”; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent—war being defined as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“There may perhaps be a new generation of doctors horrified by lacerations, infections, women who have douched with kitchen cleanser. What an irony it would be if fanatics continued to kill and yet it was the apathy and silence of the medical profession that most wounded the ability to provide what is, after all, a medical procedure.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“We now in the United States have more security guards for the rich than we have police services for the poor districts. If you’re looking for personal security, far better to move to the suburbs than to pay taxes in New York.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
“Intimately concerned as we are with the system of Europe, it does not follow that we are therefore called upon to mix ourselves on every occasion, with a restless and meddling activity, in the concerns of the nations which surround us.”
—George Canning (1770–1827)