Health and

Pre-Hospital Care 4

Paramedic

he story behind the Paramedic Academy at the

Justice Institute has an intriguing first chapter.

In 1974, Dr. Les Vertesi was a young emer-
gency physician at the Royal Columbian Hospital in
New Westminster, B.C., fresh from his medical educa-
tion in Ontario. Just before leaving to work on the west
coast, he had heard that the Ontario health minister was
dismantling a pilot project to train paramedics in his
home province.

“I couldn't understand why he was doing that,’ Dr. Vertesi recalls.
“T got on the plane seething with anger.” He was primed when a colleague
at Royal Columbian invited him to take over a project to formally train

only the second class of paramedics, who—like all the other attendantsin =F reciising @ ich Poromeaic scucents ai
B.C.—were then working for private ambulance services. Soon afterwards, tay iniqhi need to tne Oxavuigan Corpus
the provincial government of Dave Barrett passed the Emergency Health = roplicite in rai life ip Kelowna (ubove) leari:
Services Act and brought the private companies with their managers and = (cnasiie), o class of c2out cdminis:erina IVs
staff into a province-wide system to be called the British Columbia Ambu- — nae.mecics cbsarve the fy Sitlation traitiny.
lance Service. eodvety ef a ochy from a

Dr. Peter Ransford, a retired pediatric physician in Victoria, became = siocK t2vs9.

the first Executive Director of the Emergency Health Services Commission.
He worked with Carson Smith, the owner of Metropolitan Ambulance
Service of Vancouver, to set up the public ambulance network. Dr. Vertesi
became its medical Director.

He and the service's head of training, Art Berry, visited Seattle and
Los Angeles to research paramedic instruction. “At this time,” he says, “we
were all watching a TV show called Emergency! from L.A. and we went
there to see what real paramedics were doing.’ In Vancouver, they launched
a small training school for ambulance attendants serving Royal Colum-