The word "paramedic" can have different meanings in different places. In places, for example Canada and South Africa, the word is used by all people who work in the emergency medical services. In other places, for example the United States and the United Kingdom, the word can only be used by people who have special training and have passed the right exams.  In the US and UK, not everyone who works with an ambulance is a paramedic, and some people don't know that.
- 1 History of paramedicine
- 2 Places of work
- 3 Examples of skills performed by paramedics
- 4 Different qualification levels across the world
- 5 Medicolegal authority
- 6 In the media
- 7 See also
- 8 References
- 9 External links
History of paramedicine[change | edit source]
Early history[change | edit source]
Paramedicine (what paramedics do) has developed from military conflicts. Imperial Roman Centaurions were the first to have a way of managing their hurt soldiers. When injured, the soldier would be moved from danger to a safe place and would have therapy, for example suturing wounds and completing amputations. In later wars, for example the Crusades, the Knights Hospitallers of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem did similar things. They are now know as St. John Ambulance.
The first ambulance was made during the Napoleonic War and was called the ambulance volante. It was created by Napoleon's Chief Surgeon, Baron Dominique Jean Larrey. This new horse-drawn carriage was used to transport the wounded rapidly to surgeons. These early ambulances were seen by the military as a general resource, and care of the wounded came second. It was common for ambulances to carrying ammunition to the battlefront, before they transported the wounded back. The basic design of ambulances did not change for nearly 100 years.
Early ambulance services[change | edit source]
A system of first aid stations and field hospitals was used during the American Civil War. A network of ambulances, under the control of medical staff, made sure that patients were moved quickly to the best place for them to get care. Triage was also first used. The soldiers, after the war, took the same ideas and began to set up volunteer ambulance services in their home towns.
Not all places did this the same way. In Britain, ambulances were operated by the local hospital or police service. In Canada, the undertaker commonly had the only carriage that could move a person who had to lie down. In bigger cities, the ambulance service was done by the local health department, police or fire department.
People do not agree on when "ambulance attendants" (paramedics) were first formally trained. In the United States, it was probably in 1928 in Roanoke, Virginia. In Canada, it was probably 1889 in Toronto, Ontario. In the United Kingdom, it was probably even earlier.
As far as advanced skills, the military "medics" were the first to give medications like pain killers during the Second World War. Later, helicopters were used to move hurt soldiers to hospitals during the Korean War. It wasn't until much later that non-military paramedics were allowed to give medications or use helicopters.
Pre-hospital medicine[change | edit source]
By the early 1960s experiments in improving care had begun in some civilian centres. The first such experiment involved the provision of pre-hospital cardiac care by physicians in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1966 . This was repeated in Toronto, Canada in 1968, using a single ambulance called Cardiac One, staffed by a regular ambulance crew, plus a hospital intern, who was tasked with performing the advanced procedures. While both of these experiments had certain levels of success, technology had not yet reached the required level (the Toronto 'portable' defibrillator/heart monitor was powered by lead-acid car batteries and weighed nearly 100 lbs.). The required telemetry and miniaturization technologies already existed in the military, and particularly in the space program, but it would take several more years before they found their way to civilian applications. In North America, ph