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I was recently in the Bay Area, California, and had the chance to go out with a paramedic friend working with American Medical Response in Oakland, and heard a lot of the gossip about the Fire Department's takeover. Basically, there do not seem enough fires to go around, so in order to jutify their existence, the Fire Department is branching out. The feeling was that over the next few years, AMR will probably succumb. The problem with the retraining of existing firemen was that a proportion of them become unenthusiastic paramedics. There is an uneasy situation at present, as all 999 calls are routed through the Fire Services, who also send a vehicle to the scene, leading to the overkill situation where a tiny asthmatic girl has three burly firemen aswell as two paramedics filling the room. Still, all interesting to me, though we spent most of the time picking up elderly diabetics, rather than gunshot wounds or stabbings, rather to my chagrin, Oakland having a reputation for the latter. Paul Ransom ----- Original Message ----- From: Danny McGeehan <[log in to unmask]> To: <[log in to unmask]> Sent: Wednesday, September 05, 2001 12:31 AM Subject: Re: Third Watch > Colleagues > recently visiting New York and saw the film crew in Central Park filming > "Third Watch" very good show and apparently written by same authors as ER. > Managed to watch it on NBC last week and unfortunately not shown in the UK. > The two cops who were filming were very good and let me take a picture with > my 15 yr old son. They were Skip Sudduth and Coby Bell, really charming men > and pleasure to meet and made our trip to New York a pleasure.. > However the reason for the posting is that I was amazed to see that the girl > who plays the paramedic, Kim Raven was wearing the uniform of the NYFD and I > presume that she was employed by the fire service in the plot. One of the > crew told me this was the case in New York. In the UK our paramedics are > employed by seperate Health Trusts. As our health service seems to follow > the US obviously there was a policy to change the position of the US > paramedics to work for the Fire Dept. I suspect that the UK may well follow > this policy. Does anyone out there have any info on this? > BTW I hope they do show "Third Watch" in the UK it is produced by Warner > Bros and a high quality show. > Danny McGeehan FRCS FFAEM > Staffordshire > UK >