Now Providing Advanced Life Support Services
Pro Safety & Rescue, Inc. Becomes The First Private, Non-Transport ALS Agency In Kern County
No one ever wants to have a medical crisis, but it can’t always be avoided. And if the time ever comes when you need to call 9-1-1, you want to have the confidence that Emergency Medical Services are ready and available to provide the care you need… when you need it. However, during a time of crisis, there are several factors that can affect the availability of EMS teams: increased volume of 9-1-1 calls, availability of ambulances, patient offload times at hospitals, and hospital staffing shortages. And because of an additional increase in COVID-19 cases, Kern County once again finds itself in the midst of a surge capacity for medical care.
When this surge capacity was first reached at the end of 2020, Pro Safety & Rescue, Inc. was able to step in as an additional emergency response agency for lower acuity calls when ambulances were not available. However, as a provider of Basic Life Support services, Pro Safety & Rescue was limited in the scope of medical services that it could deliver to a patient. This is why Pro Safety & Rescue, Inc. has been working with Kern County EMS over the past several months, and has invested in the training and equipment necessary to become an approved provider of Advanced Life Support services.
Greater Capacity, Greater Service
By increasing our EMS status from BLS to ALS, Pro Safety & Rescue has made itself available to provide professional medical care to a greater number of people in our community. And being able to provide this higher level of care allows us to partner with other EMS agencies to keep more ambulances on the streets. Plus, this greater capacity allows our teams at Pro Safety to positively impact more people in our community.
“The pandemic has changed health care all around the world.” Says Arnold Thomas, EMS Program Director at Pro Safety & Rescue, Inc, “As a BLS agency, we were helping our community the best we could. But we wanted to do more. So we sat down and said, ‘how can Pro Safety help?”
In asking this question, the team at Pro Safety & Rescue discovered that by increasing our capacity of care, we could provide the assistance and relief that our partner agencies needed by being available to take on a greater load of emergency calls. “Now that we are ALS,” Thomas explains, “we can respond to more calls, more critical calls, instead of just BLS calls. We can respond to everything, from a heart attack, to a stroke, to a shooting, to even someone giving birth.”
Impacting our community
It’s important to us at Pro Safety & Rescue that you feel confident in your Emergency Response Services when you need them. And the EMS teams here in Kern County have done an excellent job at earning your confidence over the years.That’s why, when the pandemic came in and put pressure on these teams, we felt that one of the ways that we could serve the community was by supporting these EMS teams, and keeping your confidence levels high. As Arnold Thomas puts it, “We went through the process of becoming an ALS agency so that we can go out there and do more than just respond to BLS calls. We can do more to help our community. We can do more to help our EMS partners. We can do more to help everyone.”
We at Pro Safety & Rescue, Inc. are honored and humbled to be approved as the very first private, non-transport ALS agency in Kern County. And we promise to work hard to help bring professional Advanced Life Support services to our community, and to assist our fellow EMS partners during this time of crisis, and beyond.