GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) — If you think the majority of calls to the Green Bay Metro Fire Department are fire-related, you’d be wrong.
The bulk of calls, 68% of them so far this year, to be exact, are EMS calls.
“We have highly trained and skilled paramedics and that is really the backbone of our agency and what we do,” says Matthew Knott, Chief of GBMFD.
However, not every member of Green Bay’s fire department is also a paramedic
“All of our personnel are EMS basic, so all have some level of EMS care, all our apparatus ride with paramedics so they’re out,” Knott says. “The idea is that more paramedics are better. We can provide better, higher level service, with more individuals providing those specific skill sets.”
Now, thanks to a nearly $755,000 grant, more fire department staff will become paramedics.
It’s part of FEMA’s highly selective Assistance to Firefighters Program.
“This would fund all the course fees and overtime and backfill to send multiple people to paramedic school for the next couple of years,” says Chief Knott about the grant.
Knott says the grant also reduces the burden on taxpayers.
“We’ve seen some difficulties over the last couple of years, last year we weren’t allowed to send as many people as we wanted to paramedic school just because of our budget issues, so this grant allows us to offset our budget, send more people to class and augment our current service and expand it out in the future.”
Paramedic school, he says, isn’t for the faint of heart.
“You’re learning really advanced medical skills, really advanced diagnostics skills, it’s difficult, so it takes a special kind of person to want to go,” Knott adds.
Last year the department could only send two of the four who wanted to go to school.
But now, the department is looking to send at least five people and says interest in going is growing, too.
“When people call, we want to make sure we have the most trained, most skilled people responding to those incidents.”
Comments