Does Valley ambulance service require first aid?

On the other hand, by Frank Ameduri

Time for a new plan.

You couldn't be more correct. It is, indeed, our responsibility to get the facts straight before we print an article, and we take that responsibility more seriously than any other single tenet of our craft. I will admit that when writing editorials my blood is sometimes up, and my passion about a given topic may cloud the intent of my words. Perhaps that's what happened here. If my meaning wasn't clear to all readers, for that I do apologize.

However, after reading back through that editorial, my meaning still seems fairly clear to me, and I stand by everything I wrote. My point was not that it took the coaches and support staff too long to make the call for an ambulance. I think they did a fine job. My point was not that the ambulance took too long to respond after the call was made. In fact, seven minutes is quite impressive. My point was, and my conviction remains, that had an ambulance been parked at the high school football game, the coaches and staff wouldn't have had a decision to make. Had an ambulance been present, the response time would have been zero minutes -- which is better than seven no matter how you add it up. If an ambulance had been parked at the game, the young player would not have waited 20 minutes.

I think the people of the Valley should be grateful to the volunteers who give their time and expertise to be emergency responders in our community. While the word hero may be overused to some extent these days, the volunteer ambulance workers here in the Mat-Su are truly heroic.

My contention, though, is that it may be time to change the way we handle ambulance service here in the Valley. You wrote that if I want ambulance workers at my beck and call, I'm going to have to pay for it. Indeed. I do want ambulance people -- and fire people and other emergency response people -- at my beck and call. And I acknowledge that I'm going to have to pay for that.

We don't have ambulances at high school sporting events because the ambulance services are all volunteer. Our population is now big enough that we should seriously consider making those services professional -- we need them at our beck and call, and we ought to pay for it.

If it seemed I placed blame on the volunteers who strive to keep us safe, I apologize. I don't think anybody did anything wrong, I just think the emergency response system we currently use is no longer viable in our community. Sometimes the vehicle isn't broken, it's just not fast enough for the new freeway.

Frank Ameduri is the managing editor of Frontiersman.