Emergency!

Paramedic Roy DeSoto:
This application isn't signed.

Paramedic John Gage:
I wanted to talk to you first.

Paramedic Roy DeSoto:
Sure. What do you want to know?

Paramedic John Gage:
You went through that first class of special medical training, right?

Paramedic Roy DeSoto:
Right.

Paramedic John Gage:
If you rolled on a rescue call now. Today. Could you use that training to treat a victim on the scene?

Paramedic Roy DeSoto:
No.

Paramedic John Gage:
Then why should I, or anybody else, spend twelve weeks, or twelve minutes, learning to do what we can't do?

Paramedic Roy DeSoto:
Because you said *today*. There's a bill before the state legislature right now, Assembly Bill PM 11307, that will permit qualified fire department personnel to administer medical assistance in the field.

Paramedic John Gage:
*If* it's passed.

Paramedic Roy DeSoto:
You've asked a few questions before you came in here, didn't you?

Paramedic John Gage:
I want to find out if it's a job, or just a title.

Paramedic Roy DeSoto:
It's a job all right. It's going to be the most important advance in emergency medicine in the last fifty years.

Paramedic John Gage:
Going to be. Well, maybe you'd better just hang-on to that application until it is.

Paramedic Roy DeSoto:
That'll be too late. We're already late. Gage, there are over six-and-a-half million people in Los Angeles County right now and not nearly enough doctors to handle them even under normal conditions. When you get into an emergency situations: freeway accidents, drownings, heart attacks and a thousand others, people are dying at the scene! People who could stay alive if there was somebody at the spot who knew what to do!

Paramedic John Gage:
But they won't let you fuction.

Paramedic Roy DeSoto:
They will. They'll have to. Look, if that bill passes in the Legislature today, do you know how many people we have ready for the job?

Paramedic Roy DeSoto:
Just me, and five other guys who took the training course. Six men for six-and-a-half million people. No, we can't wait for the go ahead and then train our people. If there's once chance in a million that bill will be passed, we have to be ready.

Paramedic John Gage:
Use your pen?

Dr. Kelly Brackett M.D.:
Gentleman, you are all in danger. If an earthquake or a bomb should hit this room right now, I might be the only doctor available to all of you. Oh sure, independently owned ambulances with attendants would be here in a few minutes, and rescue units from the fire department. But all they could do is carry you off to where another doctor is waiting. I wonder if you could all last that long. Now, what about first-aid? Sure, these men are permitted to render some elementary first-aid. Like your mother did when some kid bloodied your nose, or your wife when she pulls a sliver out of your finger. Have any of you seen a freeway accident lately? I mean up close, where you can't tell the bodies from the steel. Or, have any of you had a heart attack recently? Seventy percent of all cardiac cases never live long enough to reach a hospital. How do you think your mother, or your wife, or the good-guy next door would make out under those conditions? Well, those *are* the conditions we're talking about. Now, I've given you the impression I'm in favor of fire department personnel, with a crash course in emergency medicine, taking human lives into their own hands. I am not. I'd like to see a specialist handling every bloody nose, so we'd know whether it's the result of a good right-cross or a tumor. I'd like to see a cardiologist on the scene every time someone drops in the street with a killing pain in his chest. But, you can't ask someone not to die while you're trying to find out what's wrong with him. And they *do* die, gentlemen; on the way from where it happens to my hospital. They die by the hundreds every year; not from mortal wounds, but from neglected wounds. Not from incompetence or indifference but from time, from lack of time. I'm in favor of more doctors, more hospitals and better equipment. And, I'm also in favor of this bill until those other things come along, because it *will* save lives. Maybe a dozen lives, maybe a thousand, maybe just one. And, who knows which one? Thank you, gentleman, for your time.