Monday, July 9, 2012 - 5:10am
Sen. Carper & WDEL's Amy Cherry ride in a St. Francis ambulance
Updated Monday, July 9, 2012 - 9:04am
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| WDEL's Amy Cherry and Sen. Carper ride in a St. Francis ambulance. |
St. Francis Hospital has two brand new state-of-the-art ambulances through donations and fundraising.
WDEL's Amy Cherry got to ride in an ambulance along with Senator Carper.
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The ambulance has only been in service for a month, and already has nearly 3,000 miles on it.
"We're the busiest EMS service in the state of Delaware. We do approximately 18,000 calls a year, so they're run pretty hard," says Chris Boyer, chief of EMS for St. Francis Hospital.
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Boyer tells WDEL the new, reliable ambulances have great air conditioning and better gas mileage.
"They can't believe how quiet it is, especially with a diesel engine. When you run it, you can't even tell the engine's running. It drives very, very well; it's very nice to handle, and with how narrow the streets are in the city, this ambulance fits pretty well up and down some of these side streets," says Boyer.
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Senator Carper and I got to ride through the streets of Wilmington--the same streets the EMS workers at St. Francis service every day.
Lieutenant A.J. Riccio was behind the wheel.
"We're not the paramedics, so we don't have all that fancy stuff that they have. We can do your basic life support," says Riccio, "Not really everybody's totally sick when they need ALS, they just need a ride to the hospital, where they can't walk," says Riccio.
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Riccio says right now their top call is heat-related illnesses, but they also respond to a lot of drug cases.
Senator Carper says the ride-along reminds him of how much money we spend to take care of people when they're sick.
"A lot of other places in America and across the world., they've figured out how not to spend money just on treating people when they're sick, but how do we invest to try to make sure they don't get sick. This particular vehicle, a lot of times, we end up spending money to find people, provide health for them, first aid or whatever, take them to hospitals or emergency rooms, they get admitted to hospitals - it's a very expensive form of health care delivery. We're starting to get smarter, and moving more toward there's a way that we can coordinate the delivery of health care and do it in a more cost effective way. Better health care for less money, I like to say," says Carper.
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Carper was also struck by the number of Navy medics who end up working in ambulance doing the same services they would do in Afghanistan on the streets of Wilmington.
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