I wrote this some time ago in regard to our Vietnam veterans. It is my observations as a member of the fire service for 53 years and counting:
One of the greatest contributions made by the soldiers returning home from Vietnam was that of emergency care of injuries in the pre-hospital setting.
If you were to look at the response to a traffic accident in 1960 and compare it to the response in the 1970’s you would observe a huge change. In the 1960’s it was common to have ambulances staffed by individuals that served “double duty” as the ambulance attendant as well as the funeral home attendant. Strange as it would seem today, ambulances were commonly run by mortuaries.
Enter the veterans of Vietnam, they began returning home with knowledge they had gained in that country half a world away. The experiences of treating severe trauma patients in the fields where they were injured. Field stabilization of the injured. The application of this knowledge, this concept, that lives could be saved in the prehospital setting was most pronounced in the field of traffic safety.
In the 1960’s fire departments as a general rule responded to automobile accidents if there was a fire, but ordinarily not for patient care. That would change radically as these veterans, who would become firefighters and police officers upon their return to their communities, brought change.
The Vietnam veterans began to become players in the emergency medical field in every town across the nation. They found a ready source of emergency personnel in the fire service, a service every town across the nation had. They pushed for training of firefighters to become Emergency Medical Technicians under the umbrella of the National Highways Traffic Safety Administration, an organization founded in 1970.
Soon across this nation we saw firefighters, trained as EMT’s, responding to automobile accidents as well as private residences to assist the injured as well as the sick. With these roles changing, evolution into the paramedic programs we know today, became common place. Survival of trauma patients as well as respiratory and cardiac patients no longer would wait to get to a hospital having been transported to these hospitals by funeral homes doing “double duty”. Today they are immediately treated and stabilized where they are found. Frequently IV’s in place before a trauma patient is removed from a vehicle. Critical heart medications administered in a patient’s living room.
The world of patient care had taken a huge leap forward to what we have today. Fire departments and Medic 1 programs across the nation, and the world, play the most crucial role in the survival of the ill and injured outside the hospital setting. A leap that was made possible by those men and women who had learned a better way, thousands of miles from home, in a country called Vietnam.
