Dr. Neal Richmond, the deputy medical director for New York City's fire department, will take over Louisville's new EMS shop in November. The move is part of Louisville's ongoing city-county consolidation, and according to mayor Jerry Abramson, it is intended to keep EMS focused on medicine.
In many cities, fire departments have been taking over EMS duties as the number of fires drops. In fact, Abramson merged the city of Louisville's fire and EMS back in 1995. However, a USA Today investigation last year on EMS operations in the 50 largest cities convinced Abramson that this was a mistake. The report showed how turf battles between medics and firefighters often slowed response times, costing many lives. "The best systems," Abramson says, "are more often than not medically driven, based on medical data and medically led, rather than just having a doctor as a medical officer in the fire department."
Richmond's job will be to build a new agency staffed with paramedics from the urban fire department and from the stand-alone EMS department now serving the suburbs. An early priority is to develop systems for collecting data to use in measuring the department's performance and deciding where to allocate resources. "This is a visionary move to further develop EMS," Richmond says, "and to some extent to put back into it what should've been there in the first place: a central role for medicine."
