Medic One Foundation seeks donors to help pay for firefighters’ training

EVERETT — Every year, a handful of Snohomish County firefighters attend paramedic school at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.

They learn advanced emergency medical skills, including how to insert breathing tubes and intravenous needles. The training costs $25,000 per person. The medical textbooks alone can run $1,000.

For decades, the Medic One Foundation has covered those bills. Now, the King County-based nonprofit is seeking new donors. The current class of medics, set to graduate next year, has three students from the Everett Fire Department. That’s $75,000, said Jan Sprake, the foundation’s executive director. There also are folks in training from Arlington, Camano Island, Lynnwood and Marysville.

“Every year we start a class, we start over with our campaigns,” she said. “The need now is becoming more pressing.”

Medical emergencies make up the majority of calls for fire departments these days. At Snohomish County Fire District 7 in Clearview, that’s about 80 percent of daily business.

Donations to the foundation help local medics provide quality care, said Scott Dorsey, who oversees medical services for District 7. That includes their “saves rates” — the percentage of successful resuscitations after heart attacks.

District 7 firefighter John Rouse, 27, attended last year’s paramedic school, which included an anatomy course. He’s now working as a medic in the district, under a six-month term of direct supervision.

“The knowledge and the skills we learn down there are very broad,” Rouse said. “It’s quite a jump as far as a knowledge base and a skill set going from an EMT to a medic.”

Rouse fought fires for about six years. He wanted to be able to do more to make sick people feel better, he said.

If his tuition wasn’t covered — all 2,700 hours of training — it would have come out of the fire district’s budget.

Not every fire department could afford that, he said.

Meanwhile, the classes are getting bigger, and donations haven’t bounced back from the economic collapse, Sprake said.

Paramedics have a low turnover rate, she said. They tend to stay in the job for 20 or 30 years. A lot of the longtime paramedics now are approaching retirement age.

“What we’re hearing from EMS and fire departments around the region, they anticipate this growing need over the next few years,” Sprake said.

At the Everett Fire Department, the Medic One Foundation has paid for 55 firefighters to become paramedics — nearly every Everett medic since 1982, said Tim Key, the division chief of emergency medical services.

“We’ve never had to pay tuition,” he said.

Right now, Everett has 34 medics, and all but one attended the school at Harborview with Medic One scholarships.

“We always know we’re getting top-quality paramedic training when we get them back,” Key said.

At the Marysville district, about three-quarters of the medics have gone through the same program, said Terry Matsumura, who oversees medical services there. He counts 19 Marysville medics since 1995. Of those, 15 still are working for the district.

Marysville crews make a point of attending Medic One’s annual fundraising luncheon, Matsumura said.

Each scholarship “helps a great deal,” he said. “That enables us to be able to backfill that employee while they’re gone, and it saves us money in other areas.”

Even fire departments that don’t send a lot of students to Harborview benefit from other Medic One programs, said Steve Guptill, the assistant chief at Fire District 3 in Monroe.

The Monroe district has received three grants from the foundation over the past decade, he said. The money was used for a medical rig, defibrillators, and special equipment used to carry injured people down narrow staircases.

Rikki King: 425-339-3449; rking@heraldnet.com.

More info

For more information, contact the Medic One Foundation at www.mediconefoundation.org, 206-744-9425, or MS 359747, 325 Ninth Ave., Seattle, WA, 98104-2420.