Emergency Care Status Quo Backed : Health: A county report says there is no medical evidence to justify training firefighters as paramedics.

Despite impassioned pleas to the contrary, Ventura County does not need firefighters trained as paramedics, according to a much-anticipated report released Thursday by county health and fire officials.

“There is not medical evidence to justify training and deploying . . . firefighters as paramedics throughout Ventura County,” said the report by Phillipp K. Wessels, director of the county Health Care Agency, and county Fire Chief George E. Lund.

“Our conclusion at this time is that the present system of emergency medical response, in general, serves our citizens well, and that upgrading . . . firefighters to paramedics would not measurably enhance patient outcomes,” said the report, due for review Tuesday by the Board of Supervisors.

Firefighters trained in basic life support do an adequate job of stabilizing patients until private paramedics--trained in advanced life support--arrive later by ambulance to take the patients to the hospital, the report said.

The report immediately drew praise from the ambulance companies--and criticism from the county firefighters’ union, which had been lobbying heavily for its members to become paramedics.

“Certainly, we’re pleased,” said Steven Murphy, chief administrative officer of Pruner Health Care Service, the largest of the three companies. The other two are Gold Coast Ambulance Service and Ojai Ambulance Service. “We have maintained throughout these discussions that we have provided a good service . . . for many years and have worked very hard to make this system what it is today.”

However, Carroll Hoiness, vice president of the Ventura County Professional Firefighters’ Assn., said, “If they’re saying that the medical system is working well enough, I would hope that the people that don’t get their paramedic service in time go along with them, because they’re dead.”

Most of the county’s 378 firefighters, who are trained in basic life support, are not qualified to open patients’ airways, inject them with drugs, set up an intravenous drip or do any other invasive procedures.

Private ambulance companies’ paramedics--and about 16 county firefighters--are trained and qualified to give such treatment, known as advanced life support.

The report also recommended that ambulance response times over 10 minutes be shortened in far-flung areas such as Oak View, Oak Park and Newbury Park, and that the supervisors consider centralizing the ambulance dispatch system.

Hoiness said firefighters are first on the scene 90% of the time, adding, “you can’t tell any of the citizens or us that if we had paramedics there before the ambulance gets there that it wouldn’t help stop injuries.”

“In fact,” he said, “in the last week, I’ve been in two pulmonary (cases) where people were panicking that they were about to die because their lungs were filling up with fluid.”

However, Wessels said that there is no evidence that the current system has ever cost someone’s life.

“That’s not to say there’s not a case where that has happened,” he said Thursday. “But as a general rule, we don’t believe that that claim--that people are dying because they’re not getting paramedic services quickly enough--has any merit. . . . Let’s say you and I get in an auto accident, our pelvises are crushed. We’re in extreme pain and fear for our life, but from a medical standpoint, time is not that critical. We have to look at the outcome.”

The report comes at a time when the county is considering yet another round of severe budget cuts, and emergency agencies have already cobbled together paramedic-type services of their own.

The supervisors last spring equipped county fire companies with heart defibrillators, and the private ambulance companies have volunteered paramedics full-time to the Sheriff’s Department helicopter unit, which previously had them only on weekends and holidays.

Although Hoiness accused Wessels of siding with the ambulance companies, Wessels said, “I do not have an ax to grind one way or another. I have no financial interests or biases.

“This was strictly an attempt to develop a report which would address the issue: Do the ambulances and paramedics get there quickly enough?” he said. “The indication we have is that they are arriving quickly enough, particularly now that the firefighters are trained in defibrillation procedures and they get there first.”

Hoiness said union representatives plan to protest the report at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting.