By Chris Foreman
Tribune-Review
NORTH HUNTINGDON, Pa. — North Huntingdon EMS/Rescue has joined the growing number of ambulance services that has added features that can induce hypothermia in patients suffering from cardiac arrest.
The equipment is among several interesting features in the township’s two newest ambulances, including one that went into service recently.
The squad, formerly known as Rescue 8, paid $200,000 apiece for the vehicles.
One of the most-significant life-saving features is the ability of paramedics to induce hypothermia in cardiac-arrest patients. Allegheny General Hospital and UPMC officials are proponents of the technique, said Scott Marvin, a paramedic who served on the squad’s vehicle design committee.
“The outcome has shown that there’s a significant decrease in having neurological defects afterwards,” Marvin said.
An article in the Journal of the American Academy of Physician Assistants noted that 11 percent to 48 percent of patients who survive a cardiac arrest event are discharged from the hospital “with a good neurologic outcome.”
The ambulances have a refrigeration unit to control the temperature of a saline solution to drop a cardiac patient’s body temperature into the low 30s. Meanwhile, a warming compartment keep drugs at 68 degrees for patients who are in shock.
The units are important because hospital drug-degradation studies have shown that the solutions are less effective in certain conditions, such as a brisk winter day or a sticky summer afternoon.
The custom designer for North Huntingdon’s vehicles was Ohio-based Horton Emergency Vehicles, which sells about 500 ambulances worldwide annually.
Marvin said longevity and safety were the biggest selling points with the ambulances.
Both are larger than standard ambulances, many of which are built on a pickup-style chassis that typically lasts for about 150,000 miles over a five-year period. Horton’s medium-duty ambulance is expected to have 10 to 12 years of use, with a motor designed to run for 440,000 miles.
Paramedics are seated in more of a cockpit-style configuration with a five-point racing harness instead of the traditional benches.
“We were looking at better serving patients,” Marvin said. “It’s designed to be like a delivery truck; we’re hauling patients.”
Scottdale-based Speclin, which serves as the state dealer for the American Emergency Vehicles company, is keeping tabs on possible federal regulation changes that could dictate the future of ambulances.
Among the potential stipulations could be a requirement for EMTs to wear helmets.
“The thing is, will they use them? And that’s a real issue,” said Joe Killar, a Speclin salesman.
“They’re concerned with others, not themselves,” he added. “They pretty much put themselves at risk when they’re attending to a patient.”
In addition, North Huntingdon’s vehicles are loaded with many of the types of tools firefighters take to incident scenes, such as fire-suppression systems, gear to wear in case of the use of a weapon of mass destruction or a wrecker to gain access to a crashed vehicle if the ambulance is the first unit on the scene.
“Anything and everything that we thought of went in,” Marvin said.
Copyright 2010 Tribune Review Publishing Company