Eastern North Carolina has quick access to a Level I Adult Trauma Center and a Level II Pediatric Trauma Center at Vidant Medical Center in Greenville, North Carolina, where a multidisciplinary team of trauma specialists provides the highest level of trauma care for patients.
An important part of Vidant’s emergency, trauma, and critical care services is Vidant EastCare, its air and ground medical transport service. Depending on a patient or victim’s location, they may be taken to a regional hospital and transferred to Vidant Medical Center or transported directly from the scene of the injury or illness by Vidant EastCare.
Vidant EastCare operates 22 ground ambulances throughout eastern North Carolina, including one dedicated to the Children’s Transport Team. Vidant also operates five helicopters located in five different counties. Both ground and air ambulances run by Vidant EastCare provide rapid transportation and advanced medical care to critically ill and injured patients to tertiary care centers, says Scott Sampey, administrator for Vidant EastCare.
1 REV Group built three Road Rescue Ultramedic 4x2 ambulances for Vidant Health’s Vidant EastCare, North Carolina, on Ford F-550 chassis with pass-through long bodies. (Photos courtesy of Atlantic Emergency Solutions.) 2 The Road Rescue rigs for Vidant EastCare are powered by 6.7-liter turbo diesel engines and have a 193-inch wheelbases, overall lengths of 25 feet three inches, and overall heights of nine feet five inches.
REPLACEMENT NEED
Vidant Health recently wanted to replace ambulances in its fleet and chose REV Group to build three Road Rescue Ultramedic 4x2 ambulances with the Ferno iNTRAXX Integrated Vehicle Component System™ inside the patient box, Sampey notes. “Our 120 staff members, consisting of registered nurses, paramedics, and emergency medical technicians (EMTs), are all trained for critical care transport, and we are accredited by the Commission on Accreditation of Medical Transport Systems (CAMTS),” he says. “Our ambulances are driven by EMTs and in the back are either a paramedic or a registered nurse (RN). Sometimes, if it’s a neonatal intensive care unit trip, we would have both a paramedic and an RN in the back.”
Posted: Nov 2, 2018
For those of you who have been in the fire service for more than 15 years, like I have, you most likely remember a time when a thermal imaging camera (TIC) was considered a luxury tool.
Many fire departments couldn’t afford the technology, and those that could purchase a TIC didn’t fully understand how to effectively use the tool. Today, the use of thermal imaging technology is readily accepted in the fire service as a lifesaving tool that protects firefighters from unseen dangers. I’m grateful for this opportunity to share my TIC knowledge with you each month by exploring a variety of TIC topics from firefighter disorientation to search and rescue to overhaul and much more. Together, we will explore the benefits a TIC can bring to a firefighting crew at the fire scene.
My responsibility as a trainer is to arm firefighters with an in-depth understanding of thermal imaging technology and its benefits to the fire service. My training is designed to teach firefighters how to interpret what this life-saving tool is telling them so they stay safe at a fire scene. I encourage you to share with me your experiences using a TIC and any questions you have about this technology. The more we share with each other our experiences using this technology, the safer we will be when responding to a call.
1 Photos courtesy of Bullard.
BASIC TERMS
Let’s go back to the basics of thermal imaging and examine infrared (IR) energy and solar loading. Emissivity (E) is a measure of a material’s ability to absorb and emit IR energy. Conversely, reflectance (R) is a measure of a material’s ability to reflect IR energy. Good reflectors are not good emitters and vice versa. Good reflectors appear to be the same temperature as their surroundings.
Emissivity and reflectance values range from zero to one, but in general, we only refer to a material’s emissivity value. High emissivity values (i.e., close to 1) indicate that a material emits IR much more than it reflects it. (See box for some examples.) Railroad tracks, for example (photo 1), that are active will have a low emissivity value as they would be shiny and therefore not retain much heat from the sun.
MATERIAL
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EMISSIVITY
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Brick, red rough
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.093
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