How a team of Black paramedics set the gold standard for emergency medical response
It is difficult to imagine society without the assurance that skilled, professional paramedics will respond to a medical emergency. But before the 1970s, clumsy, haphazard care, often at the hands of police officers, was the norm for emergencies. So much so that negligent ambulance care was responsible for an estimated 1,200 to 2,000 preventable deaths per year in the United States, according to journalist and former paramedic Kevin Hazzard.
In his new book American Sirens, Hazzard narrates the eight-year saga of the Freedom House Ambulance Service, the all-Black team of paramedics who pioneered the profession from 1968-1975 in Pittsburgh.
The book documents an untold piece of American history, recording how Freedom House saved thousands of lives and influenced the emergence of professional paramedic services in cities across the U.S., eventually setting the gold standard of emergency medical care.
Hazzard begins the book through the eyes of John Moon, a Black man who was born into poverty at Atlanta's Grady Hospital but found his calling as a Freedom House recruit. Other prominent Freedom House contributors include Dr. Peter Safar, the Austrian-born physician who co-founded Freedom House Ambulance Service shortly after he invented mouth-to-mouth resuscitation; and Dr. Nancy Caroline, the first medical director of Freedom House who authored the seminal emergency medical services text Emergency Care in the Streets.
With his professional EMS experience, Hazzard's writing feels like a paramedic ride-along, witnessing medical chaos – intubating patients against the clock, confronting frightened patients and their distressed relatives, and competing with an adversarial police force.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/11/05/1132533191/how-a-team-of-black-paramedics-set-the-gold-standard-for-emergency-medical-respo
I didn't know any of this, and I'm a nurse, FFS. I bet most of us didn't know it either. I will be looking for this book.
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