bian. The courses were given in cramped quarters on the grounds of the
St. Mary’s Ukrainian Orthodox Church on West 16% Avenue near Cambie.
Then Vancouver General Hospital came into the program and trained
attendants at the hospital. The training was supported by union members
of the Ambulance Paramedics of B.C.

The results were rewarding. As Dr. Vertesi reported to a national
conference of skeptical emergency physicians, hed personally verified that
the new service had saved about sixty victims of cardiac arrests in its first
two years. B.C. was obviously ahead of its time because half the doctors in
his audience left, protesting that non-physicians were doing procedures
such as endotracheal intubation.

Successful as the public ambulance model appeared to be, its funding
from the Emergency Services Commission was drying up four years after
the government of Bill Bennett came into power in 1975. “We were desper-
ately trying to get money and the word was ‘Sorry, you're not getting any
more,’ Dr. Vertesi recalls. “We had to send our teachers home, dismantle
the school and no longer have any more paramedic classes. We put every-
thing in boxes and had a farewell party.’ Then that very day, television news
reported that the provincial Attorney General Alan Williams had collapsed
outside the downtown courthouse in Vancouver. “An ambulance had been
on the scene as a precaution and paramedics had treated him for an anaphy-
lactic reaction and brought him to the hospital in great condition”

When television reporters interviewed Dr. Vertesi about why the
government was ending the paramedic funding just as the minister was
rescued, he confesses, “I lied on camera, saying ‘J hadn’t heard it was
closing’— which was strictly speaking true because no one said we had
to close it, they just told us we weren’t getting any money. And I did say
that ‘I’m sure the government’s intention was to keep it going, realizing
this was a valued program’—because it was never actually government
that decided to cut us off, it was only the bureaucracy in the Ministry of
Health.” I got a phone call that afternoon from the Ministry saying our
funding was secure—and from then on, we never looked back.”

Financially sound, the training program now needed a more perma-
nent, respectable home. A community college was one option, but the
recently formed Justice Institute submitted a proposal in response to initial
discussions, inviting the paramedic school to consider the Jericho site. Dr.
Vertesi met with the Principal, Gerry Kilcup, and the JIBC’s Dean of Educa-
tional Services, Larry Goble. “It sounded perfect,” he remembers. “We had
this new place in a fabulous environment and the possibilities were obvious
to everyone.”

While staying on as a medical advisor, he soon welcomed Tony
Williams as founding Director of the Emergency Health Services Academy
(EHSA). “He brought a tremendous amount of rigor to the program that

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