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Black Kos, Week In Review - The First Modern EMS Service [1]

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Date: 2022-11-25

The Freedom House Street Saviors

Commentary by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor

A cry in the night

She's not breathing

Such a frantic sight

Call for an ambulance so frightening



We wait and wait doing our best

CPR ongoing we struggle on

It goes to ten then twenty, thirty minutes our quest

To save a life but it is now lost and gone



An ambulance service way under staffed struggling with care

Driving from emergency to emergency an endless song

I wonder if the politicians would think different if it was theirs

Waiting and hoping for an ambulance all along. Paul Warren

Paramedics serve as lifelines in the US, responding to all kinds of medical emergencies. Yet the history of the emergency medical services (EMS), and the crucial role African-Americans played in that development is mostly unknown. The first professional trained EMS service in the United States started as a jobs program for Black men in Pittsburgh. I first heard this story during Netroots Pittsburgh many years ago, but I didn’t remember it until recently hearing it again on the radio.

In 1966, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) published a white paper that was a damning indictment of the nation’s emergency response system. “Essentially, paramedics weren’t plentiful enough to be there when you needed them and then weren’t well trained enough to be of much use when they were there,”. Ambulances existed, but they were privatized and didn't offer emergency care or go everywhere. In many cases “ambulances” were just hearses driven to accidents by undertakers from a funeral home that would later help plan the patient’s funeral. In other cases, the sick or injured might be tended to by police officers or volunteer firefighters who were not trained to provide emergency care. "Back in those days, you had to hope and pray you had nothing serious," recalls filmmaker and Hollywood paramedic Gene Starzenski, who grew up in Pittsburgh. "Because basically, the only thing they did was pick you up and threw you in the back like a sack of potatoes, and they took off for the hospital. They didn't even sit in the back with you."

That changed with the start of the Freedom House Ambulance Service, the city's first mobile emergency medicine program. Starzenski tells the story in his documentary Freedom House Street Saviors.

x YouTube Video



The situation for Americans needing medical care had become so dire that according to the NAS 1966 report’s most damning line: “Expert consultants returning from both Korea and Vietnam have publicly asserted that, if seriously wounded, their chances of survival would be better in the zone of combat than on the average city street.” Wounded soldiers at least were treated accompanied by trained medics. The report reads “In 1965, 52 million accidental injuries killed 107,000, temporarily disabled over 10 million and permanently impaired 400,000 American citizens at a cost of approximately $18 billion,”. Furthermore lack of what we now would call 1st aid “...is the leading cause of death in the first half of life’s span.”

This lack of emergency care hit home for Peter Safar. Safar was an Austrian-born anesthesiologist at the University of Pittsburgh and a pioneer of CPR who helped to develop the modern hospital Intensive Care Unit (ICU). Safar had lost his daughter in 1966 to an asthma attack because she didn’t get the right help between her house and the hospital. So he coped with the loss by designing the modern ambulance—including the equipment inside, plus its paint scheme. Perhaps most crucially, he also designed the world’s first comprehensive course to train paramedics. In the 1960s, Pittsburgh, like most cities, was segregated by race. But people of all colors suffered from lack of ambulance care. In 1967 Phillip Hallen advanced the idea of high quality emergency medical service. Phillip was president of the Maurice Falk Medical Fund, a former ambulance driver, and Chairman of the OEO Health Committee. Morton Coleman, of Pitt's Graduate School of Social Work, suggested combining an ambulance service with a program to train unemployed and underemployed black men and women as medical technicians. Searching for an owner/operator Hallen approached the recently formed Freedom House Enterprises, Inc. (FHE). FHE was an outgrowth of the United Negro Protest Committee located at 2027 Centre Avenue. In an unprecedented partnership with Dr. Peter Safar, known as the Father of CPR; a world leader in resuscitation research; and other pioneers in emergency medicine, Freedom House Paramedics began. The idea at first was just to switch the service from delivering food to driving people to medical appointments, so Freedom House recruited a group of young black men to be these very first emergency medical technicians. Some were high school dropouts and most of them were considered unemployable. Starting from a base in Presbyterian and Mercy Hospitals in 1968, they became the first Paramedics in the United States. Within eight months, drivers were trained to handle emergencies including heart attacks, seizures, childbirth, and choking. The service became the national model, but it started out by serving Pittsburgh's mostly black Hill District. Nowadays, the Hill District is famous because of its prominence in playwright August Wilson's work. In the 1960s, like many city neighborhoods, it teemed with racial unrest. Their first calls took place during the uprising following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968.

Data overwhelmingly showed that the training worked. One 1972 study of 1,400 patients, over two month, transported to area hospitals by Freedom House, found the driver-paramedics delivered correct care to critical patients 89% of the time. The study by contrast, found police and “volunteer ambulance services” delivered the right care only 38% and 13% of the time, respectively. In fact Nancy Caroline, a Freedom House member, wrote a textbook on EMS training that became the national EMS standard. Black people were not the only Pittsburgh residents who suffered from lack of care in those days. In 1966, the city's mayor collapsed. By the time he reached the hospital in a police car, he had gone too long without oxygen; he later died. Starzenski's family also experienced the difficulties before Freedom House services existed. His grandfather suffered a fall in the early 1960s. "When they came to the house," Starzenski says, "they didn't have any equipment. My grandfather, his head was bleeding pretty bad, and the only thing they did was they asked us for a towel and they slapped a towel around my grandfather's head and they took off to the hospital." But things were more perilous in predominantly black neighborhoods, where people would wait longer for police transport. "No one would go to the Hill District, in the same way that taxicabs were hesitant to go there," says Phil Hallen, who ran a foundation at the time that focused on bringing health care to the poor.

Despite the success of Freedom House, the city killed the program in 1975. Pittsburgh Mayor Peter Flaherty thought he could create a better system. But in fact he just replaced Freedom House’s black drivers with an all-white paramedic corps. Kevin Hazzard who has done research on Freedom House, believes racism was at play. As he puts it, “What other reason could [Pittsburgh Mayor Peter Flaherty] have for not wanting this organization, which was so successful and was a model around the country and around the world, other than the fact that they were an almost entirely Black organization.”

x YouTube Video . The real story “doesn’t make the city look good,” Hazzard says, so that’s why he thinks the story of the nation’s first paramedics is not better known. But Hazzard believes there are lessons in this story that are useful for all professions, not just paramedics. Many of the Freedom House participants went on to get master’s degrees, Ph.D.s, or medical degrees—or pursued careers in politics or the upper echelons of police, EMS, and fire departments. “These were really successful people who came from nowhere and where it all began was an opportunity in 1967,” Hazzard says. “All it took for a group of young men that the world had written off was one opportunity, and they never looked back from that point. Anyone can reach great heights. They just simply need a single opportunity.”

SOURCES:

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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor

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Jeffries is known for bringing different groups together, though he’s also clashed with some progressives along the way. VOX: Hakeem Jeffries’s ascent to Democratic leader, explained

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To get a sense of how Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) would approach the job of House minority leader, look no further than his work on the 2018 First Step Act, his supporters say.

Jeffries was a lead House sponsor of that bill, the most significant criminal justice reform to pass Congress in years. To get it done, he collaborated with a wide spectrum of Democrats, the Trump administration, and Republican co-sponsor Rep. Doug Collins. Jeffries’s willingness to work with all of these groups and weigh their input ensured the measure ultimately came to fruition, according to other House members.

“He was able to negotiate first within the party itself,” Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), a co-sponsor of the bill and a Jeffries ally, told Vox. “And then was able to work out a deal with the Republicans.”

Whether Jeffries, 52, is able to establish that same consensus within a divided Democratic caucus will determine just how successful he is in this job.

The New York representative, a member of both the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) and the Congressional Black Caucus, is poised to make history as the first Black party leader in the House. His ascent, supporters say, has been marked by the ability to bring together disparate groups, though he has clashed with some progressives in the past. In this new role, Jeffries will have to navigate the ideological differences in his own caucus while finding ways to counter Republican initiatives and messaging as part of the minority.

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In the DC Comics alternate dimension known as Bizarro World, everything is backward. Bizarro green lights mean stop; Bizarro Mount Everest is the smallest mountain on planet Htare, and Bizarro Superman is evil. Though the idea of an oxymoronic universe seems scary to most people, I’ve always wanted to visit Bizarro America, where discrimination, racism and inequality are replaced by ability, fairness and equal opportunity. And if Detinu Setats actually existed, then there must be someone who exemplifies an inverse version of white privilege.

Perhaps there is a Bizarro “Don” — a real estate developer and hotel owner who made his fortune in the 1980s without the help of white privilege, racism or his daddy’s money.

Meet Business Icon Roy Donahue “Don” Peebles.

“Today, there is over $82 trillion invested in venture capital and private equity,” explained Don Peebles during his acceptance speech at the inaugural “Byron Allen Presents theGrio Awards” for the Business Icon Award. “Of that $82 trillion, less than 1.3% of it is invested in firms run and owned by women and people of color combined. What that means is 98.7% of all venture capital money is provided to white men …

This one statistic illuminates what I refer to is economic apartheid.”

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Julius Maada Bio says 22% allocation of total government funding is needed to ensure all children can go to school. The Guardian: Sierra Leone’s president defends large education budget as ‘necessary risk’

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Sierra Leone’s president has defended his decision to spend almost a quarter of the national budget on education, saying the country cannot develop unless all children go to school.

Speaking to the Guardian, Julius Maada Bio admitted that allocating 1.7tn leones (£80m) this year for its ambitious educational reform programme was a risk, but said: “We are throwing all our resources, all our energy into education. We cannot develop without improving education. I see it as an existential issue.

“I had to walk barefoot to school, with not even shoes on my feet. For me to come to this level of leadership, I think education has played a very important role.”

The Bio administration launched its “radical inclusion” programme in 2018, aiming to get millions more children into school by offering free, quality education to all youngsters, particularly those from poor and marginalised groups.

The government allocated 22% of this year’s budget to education, which represents one of the largest-percentage funding commitments in the world and double the percentage allocation in 2016. Additional money is being sourced from donors.

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WELCOME TO THE FRIDAY PORCH

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