Czech It Out!

Many of you know that I am a certified Emerency Medical Technician and my passion is emergency medicine. Well....last night I had the opportunity to see a Czech Ambulance! One of my students at Majak is married to a doctor who works for the ambulance services. I shared with my class my future plans for a career in medicine which led to an invitation to see how emergency medicine is done here in Czech. What a great experience it was!

Here in Vsetin, there is one ambulance station with 4 ambulances. There are 4 pairs of paramedics & EMTs (equivalents) and 2 doctors on at any given time. There are a couple of ambulances stationed at the hospital and in a nearby town, one more ambulance with a crew of two. The "Zlin Region" in which the emergency medical services respond to stretches over 40 km (all the way to the Slovokian border). Dan, (the doctor who showed me around) told me it can take over an hour to arrive at a call depending on the route they have to take, weather, and other factors.

They too, work 12 hour shifts. The inside of the ambulances look very similar to that of an American ambulance. They also have different numbers you call if you have an emergency. The number for the Medical Emergency service is 155. The number for the Fire Department is 150 and 158 for the Police Department. The dispatch center is in Zlin which is 35 km from Vsetin. Dispatch decides what crew goes on the call-- 2 or 3 man crew with a doctor.

When a call comes in, the dispatch comes over the intercom and says which crew will go (saying the ambulance #). The details of the call print from the computer and the map on the computer shows the crew where they must go.  The new ambulance has a GPS system inside it also. It is not common for the crew to use radios for communication. There are so many hills and valleys in this region that they are pretty much useless. The dispatch center can track the ambulance at any given time. Czech emergency services are similar to the that of the US. Their procedures may differ a bit but in general, the equipment and practices are the same.