Emergency Medical Services in Spain

One of these in your rearview mirror and you need to make room for it to pass!

I wrote of the design of the funeral hearse in my last blog. Little did I know how close I had come to writing also of the ambulance service as in days gone by, often a funeral director was the operator of both services making multi-use of the same vehicle. After all, if you needed to lie down did you really need two vehicles if you could accomplish the same thing in one?

I guess we all became a little squemish, but I can understand that. I imagine having had a bad accident and being collected in the dual use vehicle. If you woke up along the way you could be forgiven for panicking. Am I dead?
Am I on the way to hospital or mortuary? It is quite enough to have to worry about how the hell am I going to pay for this?

We take our Emergency Medical Services for granted because whenever we need them they are there for us. However, a lot of thought has gone into making the service what it is today. In the past often the means of taking someone to hospital was in an available car. A passenger waved a white cloth out the window and the driver lay permanently on the horn. Many of  today's ambulances offer only transportation to hospital with no first aid enroute. These are called : "Ambulancia no-assistancial." They are generally crewed by one driver, or perhaps with an assistant as well.

From June, 2012, the crew of these ambulances must hold an EMT-B certificate, or a Professional Ceretificate of Proficiency for emergency Technicians. Although they do not promise to offer assistance along the way, should the need arise they might intervene to try and get the patient to the hospital alive.

The next step up from that are those ambulances noted as "Ambulancia de SVB." That means that they do provide basic life support, and are generally crewed by two or three personnel.

At the top of the chain is the "Ambulancia de SVA/UVI Movil." If this service is available to respond to really complicated emergencies patients have a better chance of survival to hospital as the service includes a doctor, a nurse, an assistant and a driver. This is the most advanced system in Spain and approximates the EMS service in The United States of America.

I have grown very interested in these types of assistance and rescue services, so I will study more on the most extreme services with a view to writing about a day in the life of such a crew.

More next week!!!!

Copyright (c) 2013  Eugene Carmichael