Emergency Medical Services
The City of Racine Fire Department employs a rapid response, knockout punch strategy for responding to medical emergencies within the community. This approach provides us with the immediate resources necessary to prevent medical emergencies from becoming catastrophic, life ending events. We send the right equipment and enough personnel to do the job correctly the first time. This option best suits our community's needs and our available resources.
Advanced Life Support Calls for cardiac emergencies, heart attacks, strokes, diabetic reactions, asthma, and other breathing difficulties results in the closest fire engine to the incident along with a Paramedic rescue squad being dispatched at the same time. All fire engines carry emergency medical supplies that allow those crews to immediately start life saving measures while waiting for the Paramedic rescue squad to arrive. We have more staffed fire engines than rescue squads.
Effectively and immediately mitigating an incident maximizes our on duty resources, prevents additional risk to our citizens, reduces property losses, and improves the safety of our fire fighters and paramedics.
Approximately 85% of all annual emergency calls for service are medical in nature. For 2013 this involved approximately 8,500 calls. Of these 8,500+ EMS related calls, over 4,800 EMS calls or about 60% of the calls, required advanced life support (Paramedics) compared to the national average of approximately 40%.