Philadelphia’s Failure

Ambulance Science Podcast: Philadelphia’s failure to fund EMS forces “meat wagon-tactics" by police, while surgeons ignore the real problem, say Scot Phelps and Maria Werner.   Key Points: Philadelphia Fire EMS is severely underfunded, with a unit-hour utilization of 1.0, meaning they're busy 100% of the time, leading to a delayed response time As a result, critical penetrating trauma patients are transported by police, without any care, in the back of prisoner vans to trauma centers But rather than advocating for more ambulances, especially in this era of limiting police scope creep, surgeons consistently try to justify the police transport model