What is a Paramedic?

Highly trained paramedics initiate treatment to stabilize patients prior to commencing transport to the hospital. In some cases a Paramedic can completely reverse the condition allowing for the patient to remain at home. For specific conditions, stabilizing the patient at the scene frequently allows for the reversal of life-threatening conditions that otherwise would result in a long term detrimental outcome if treatment was postponed until arrival at a hospital.

Paramedics administer treatment and medications for a variety of conditions including: chest pain, trouble breathing, heart failure and emphysema as well as treating a host of other medical conditions. We also treat patients with various traumatic injuries ranging from the broken nose to the most significantly injured patients.

All of our Paramedics are also state certified in various rescue practices, which allows all of our personnel to interchangeably work on either a Medic Unit or Rescue Truck. Many of our Paramedics are also certified in numerous other categories that allow our personnel to respond to calls for assistance from specialty teams such as the Urban Search and Rescue Team, PA Strike Team-1, Allegheny County Hazmat Medical Response Team, City of Pittsburgh HazMat and Allegheny County HazMat, just to name a few. As well as being certified in so many different domains, many of our Paramedics are actually instructors in a wide variety of Public Safety disciplines and several serve as field preceptors for Paramedic students and emergency physicians.