City of Houston Emergency Medical Service
The Houston Fire Department handles all emergency medical services within the City of Houston and all members of the department are trained in EMS procedures. The firefighters rotate between the fire fighting apparatus and the EMS units from day to day in accordance with the cross training that they receive. There are two levels of EMS certification that the Houston Fire Department recognizes; EMT-Basic and EMT-Paramedic. There are no EMS providers for the Houston Fire Department that are not also firefighters. All of HFD EMS ambulances are Type I, "Frazer Bilt", ambulances.
Due to the large coverage area, HFD EMS operates on a tiered response system, which means that certain levels of EMS are dispatched when they are determined to be needed. While there are some MICU ambulances in the HFD EMS fleet, most are BLS equipped. Typically, a BLS ambulance will be dispatched to a medical call. When the unit arrives on scene and determines that ALS is required, a paramedic squad will be dispatched to their location to assist. HFD EMS strives to have an ambulance or first responder (which usually consists of an engine company), on scene within four minutes, with ALS support within eight minutes if needed.
Read more about this topic: Houston Fire Department, Background
Famous quotes containing the words city of, city, houston, emergency, medical and/or service:
“The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents.... It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.... It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“Washington is a very easy city for you to forget where you came from and why you got there in the first place.”
—Harry S. Truman (1884–1972)
“When your dreams tire, they go underground
and out of kindness that’s where they stay.”
—Libby Houston (b. 1941)
“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)
“Civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)