HISTORY
1976 Onwards...
25 years from our meager beginning we were progressing to meet all the challenges we could foresee in the future. We not only covered all the fire calls in our district, we were involved with water rescue by having a state of the art watercraft, and a certified scuba team. We became passionately involved in public education, prevention and community programs.
We now accepted the growing challenge of our community growth in emergency medical services to reduce the risk of life to heart, trauma, drowning, and vehicle incidents, etc. To do this, we organized five Fire Departments and six hospitals to set up a standard system for patient care, cost and a transportation system through private enterprise. This kept costs low because patients who used the system paid, not the taxpayer.
We then trained and hired paramedic personnel to continue improving our services to the community. During this period, we strived to achieve what is called the "Golden Hour", which is the time between an incident until the patient is in the trauma center receiving critical care.
During this period, we became involved with the Redington Beach, Redington Shores and North Redington Beach by providing one our paramedics as part of the Redington Fire Departments response group. This was a cooperative effort to provide needed services to these three neighboring communities, placing qualified medical personnel on the scene in a quick response time.
More History will follow shortly...