When there's a serious traffic accident with injuries, people take comfort in knowing that an ambulance is on the way. But when the crash involves an ambulance, patients and paramedics are put at risk because ambulance design has not kept pace with developments in vehicle safety.
That’s what happened in January 2014, when an ambulance from Allina Health Emergency Medical Services was hit head-on by an SUV on a snowy night in Buffalo Township. The two paramedics were severely injured and the driver of the SUV died.
“It really set us on a path to say we have to do something different,” said Jeff Czyson, director of operations for Allina’s ambulance service.
The force of the collision drove the ambulance’s steering wheel to the back of the driver’s compartment, leaving the driver with numerous broken bones. The other paramedic, who was attending to the patient, was thrown forward, hitting the front of the back cabin and suffering a traumatic brain injury.
Nationwide, there are about 4,500 ambulance accidents every year, with one-third of them resulting in injury.
After the accident, Allina EMS set out to make its ambulances safer but found that the industry’s designs had changed little since the 1980s. “Compared to the advances in passenger vehicles, it is night and day,” Czyson said.
Instead, Allina EMS decided to design an ambulance of its own.
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