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.”