History
In 1968, motivated by the work of Frank Pantridge cardiologist Leonard Cobb proposed to the chief of the Seattle Fire Department, Gordon Vickery, training firefighters to treat cardiac arrest. The department was attractive to Cobb because it already provided first aid and tracked its performance electronically.
In 1969, they trained fifteen firefighters and used a grant from the Washington/Alaska Regional Medical Program to convert a large motor home into a Mobile Coronary Care Unit (nicknamed “Moby Pig”) which would respond to calls with both the firefighter paramedics and a physician on board.
The first Medic One call was on March 7, 1970 and during the program's first year, 31 lives were saved. The following year the program was changed, replacing the on-board doctors with fire department paramedics given advanced special training and remote access to the doctors.
In 1974, TV news-magazine, 60 Minutes, profiled the success of Medic One, lauding the high standards of training and education provided by the Seattle training program. Correspondent Morley Safer declared, “If you have to have a heart attack, have it in Seattle.” A phrase still used frequently in conjunction with Medic One, due to its continued success which is reflected in the area's high survival rate for heart attacks and their comprehensive CPR training program.
That same year Medic One incorporated as a privately held, non-profit organization and established the Medic One Foundation, which works on behalf of both fund raising and the expansion of the program. The program is financed by local property tax levies, which are voted on by the public every six years, along with private and corporate donations.
Medic One service was expanded throughout King County in 1976 and, at that time, had been credited with saving the lives of 655 people who were clinically dead at the time paramedics arrived on scene. As the program's reputation grew, other counties in Washington State began adopting their own Medic One programs in conjunction with the Medic One Foundation.
In 1979, the program further evolved when Cobb worked with UW professor Mickey Eisenberg to start the training of fire department emergency medical technician - basics to administer defibrillation treatment, as these EMTs are first on the scene, often arriving prior to the paramedics by several minutes. In 1982 a program was launched training 9-1-1 dispatchers to provide CPR instructions over the phone. The advent of automatic heart defibrillators in 1984 made it even easier for EMTs to treat heart attack victims.
Read more about this topic: Seattle & King County Emergency Medical Services System
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did.”
—Malcolm Bradbury (b. 1932)