Butler Memorial Hospital once had an ambulance service
The current emergency medical services crisis facing Butler County isn’t the first.
While the county commissioners are funding ongoing training programs for emergency medical technicians and paramedics today, Butler Memorial Hospital started a paramedic response unit and an ambulance service that later became known as Medic One beginning in the mid-1980s.
Decades before becoming part of Independence Health System, the hospital initiated a paramedic response unit that assisted ambulance services in the county by providing a paramedic to respond to emergency medical calls at no cost to the ambulance services.
When the hospital started the paramedic response unit in 1985, most ambulance services had emergency medical technicians, but few had paramedics, said Jenna Enscoe, hospital emergency services director.
“Paramedics were few and far between. Not many services had paramedics,” Enscoe said.
Ambulance services that needed a paramedic for an emergency response would contact the hospital and a paramedic from the hospital would respond. Two of those paramedics — John Spryn and Dan Green — still work for the hospital.
“Our service was free,” said Spryn. “It was an excellent idea. It was before its time. It was so new, so different.”
“It started due to a lack of paramedics,” Green said.
The hospital ran the paramedic response unit until 1997. For two years it overlapped with Medic One, which began in 1995 and ended in 1997.
Medic One was dispatched to emergency calls through the county 911 system and responded from its base at the hospital with a staff consisting of a paramedic, nurse and flight nurse. Flight nurses, who normally work on medical helicopters, are trained to provide higher levels of care than other nurses.
The flight nurse on Medic One was Larry Hildebrand, who is now a flight nurse with STAT MedEvac and a paramedic.
“This my 31st year,” Hildebrand said. He has been recognized for completing 5,000 emergency medical flights.
Spryn, Green and Hildebrand graduated together in 1981 from the paramedic training class at ACMH Hospital.
Vern Smith, who was the paramedic coordinator at the hospital and Butler County’s emergency medical coordinator, started Medic One and the paramedic response unit.
He said both were started to help communities with the lack of paramedics.
“We started the paramedic response unit to augment the ambulance services for the county,” Smith said. “We started in November 1985. It was the first hospital-based paramedic response unit in Pennsylvania.”
He said the paramedic profession originated in the Vietnam War. That’s when the concept of treating injured patients in the field before taking them to a hospital to reduce fatalities began, he said.
“Medic One was a very unique concept,” Smith said. “I’m fortunate to say we had the support of the hospital because there was no financial support for that unit. The auxiliary helped fund it. It really set us in the forefront in health care.”
