How America Created, then Forgot, Its Early Emergency Medical LegacyDonnie Woodyard, Jr.
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Length3h 29m
About this audiobook
The crisis in American emergency medical services is not that the profession is young. It is that the profession is old, and has been rebuilt on the ruins of something it no longer remembers.
This book reveals a forgotten history: physician-staffed ambulances in the 1860s, hospital-integrated networks funded by municipal budgets, all dismantled by depression, war, and replaced by a transport-only model with no medical training standards and no clinical mission. The EMS system rebuilders of the 1970s created the paramedic, but the compromises they made were supposed to be temporary.
The nation never went back to finish the work.
The struggles EMS faces today are not new. They are inherited — and this is the history that explains why.
DONNIE WOODYARD JR., has spent three decades in Emergency Medical Services. Starting as a volunteer EMT in Virginia and training as a paramedic in Ohio, Donnie has since served as an EMS Chief, Paramedic Instructor, the State EMS Director in two states, Chief Operating Officer of the National Registry of EMTs, Chair of the Interstate Commission for EMS Personnel Practice, and Executive Director of the United States EMS Compact. Internationally, he led the establishment of the modern EMS system in Sri Lanka and has contributed to EMS system development across Asia. View all by Donnie Woodyard, Jr.
