By Lori Van Ingen
The Intelligencer Journal/New Era
LANCASTER, Pa. — Staying calm and collected in the face of horrific tragedy is the key to being a good emergency medical technician, according to Dr. Miles G. Newman.
The Elizabethtown osteopathic doctor should know. He has been working with advanced-life-support units for more than 40 years.
Newman said it’s an honor to represent the ambulance units and teach EMS.
“I’ve been medical director so long. I don’t know how they put up with me so long,” Newman said.
What Newman enjoys about being on the front lines with pre-hospital care is taking care of patients who are really upset and who are really sick.
Newman recently received the George E. Moerkirk, M.D., Memorial Senior Volunteer of the Year Award from the Pennsylvania Emergency Health Services Council. The award honors an active volunteer EMS provider age 65 or older.
“It’s great. A lot get it after they die. What good is it then? To get this now, it’s very nice,” Newman said.
Newman, 71, was nominated for the award by his group of doctors at Elizabethtown Family Health Center to show their appreciation for him. “Everybody likes to be appreciated,” he said.
Newman works in his office three days a week and covers several area nursing homes: Rheems Nursing Home, ManorCare in Elizabethtown, Longwood in Maytown, Hearthstone in Mount Joy, Columbia Cottage in Hershey and Masonic Village in Elizabethtown.
He has volunteered as medical director of Northwest Emergency Medical Services, Elizabethtown, for more than 40 years and Warwick Community Ambulance, Lititz, for seven years.
Newman said he plans to keep going as long as his health holds out. “At least as long as (Penn State football coach) Joe Paterno. He’s my guide.”
Working in the medical field is all in the family for Newman. His father, Lewis, was an anesthesiologist in Philadelphia, and his younger brother, Benjamin, is a retired family doctor who did pre-hospital work in the Orlando Medical Services in the Reserves.
Newman himself served in the U.S. Army from 1957 to 1959 as a medical laboratory technician.
He is a graduate of Wilmington (Ohio) College and Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine. He did his internship at Lansing (Mich.) General Hospital.
Following his internship, Newman moved to Elizabethtown and took over the practice of Dr. Bill Bovard. He also was a full-time emergency-room doctor at the former Osteopathic Hospital of Lancaster - which later became Community Hospital - retiring from that position 10 years ago.
When Newman came to Lancaster County, ambulances did little more than transport patients to the hospital. Then, Newman helped start the advanced-life-support unit at the former Community Hospital in 1968. “They gave me the money, so I put it on the road,” he said.
This was seven or eight years before there were EMTs, he said.
“That’s how I got started,” he explained. “I was teaching the guys my corpsman skills. We got a heart defibrillator and had advanced life support system. There were no laws, no manual. I wrote a manual up for the guys,” Newman said.
Pre-hospital devices are totally different from emergency room equipment - from monitors to splints to backboards and extrication tools for vehicle accidents. They work in a smaller ER - in a box, essentially, he said.
“St. Joe’s had the first official unit,” Newman said. “They’d come up and we’d have the person resuscitated. I taught the local docs how to do some stuff. A doctor had to be there, but the guys (who were all volunteers) knew how to do it. They’d start IVs and defibrillate. We had lots of success. That was well before paramedics.”
Newman said he also taught the first paramedics class in the county in 1979.
While he has concentrated on training EMS personnel, he also frequently answers EMS calls himself. Friday nights he can be found reading medical journals in the NWEMS station while waiting to join the ambulance crew for an emergency call.
Newman also has served as a Lancaster County deputy coroner and as a doctor at the former Barnes Hall juvenile-detention facility.
He is a member of the American Osteopathic Association, Pennsylvania Osteopathic Association, Lancaster County Osteopathic Association, American College of Emergency Physicians and Prehospital Care Committee of Lancaster County and was president of the Emergency Medical Resource Committee of Lancaster County.
In 1999, Newman received a New Era Red Rose and Elizabethtown’s Vincent W. O’Connor Public Service Award.
Copyright 2009 Lancaster Newspapers, Inc.