Highlighting National EMS Week

SALISBURY, Md. – Emergency Medical Responders are being honored nationwide.

Here in Salisbury, our EMS providers are always hard at work. They often respond to calls for medical emergencies including shortness of breath, car accidents, and fire-related injuries. The Salisbury Fire Department gets about 15,000 calls a year and about 12,000 of them are EMS calls, that’s about 1 call every 40 minutes.

Salisbury Fire Department Assistant Chief Chris Truitt says EMS has come a long way in the area. “We’ve really transitioned from the “hey we come we pick you up and take you to the hospital” to we pretty much bring the emergency room to the patient, do a really in-depth assessment on the scene, do a lot of care there. And if they need to be transported sure, we’ll take them to the hospital but we now have things like our SWIFT program so we have a nurse practitioner and paramedic that can go out. And they can do even more on the field, it’s pretty amazing. It’s the 50th anniversary so this has been going on since President Ford enacted this in 1974 leaps and bounds since we first started,” said Truitt.

Truitt says many people go into this field of work because they love to give back.