MERCED, Calif. — Emergency medical professor Steven Melander knows what it means when someone dials 911.
“There's no such thing as ‘10-1-1.’ When someone dials 911, they're out of options. That's it,” he said.
That’s why Melander trains his student paramedics to rescue patients through emergency call scenarios at Merced College.
During one scenario on campus in September, student Cameron Loureiro led his team to an imaginary amputee patient in Yosemite National Park. The fictional patient lost his arm and leg to a woodchipper while clearing the forest floor.
Loureiro, 22, strapped the dummy onto a stretcher, and his partner cinched two tourniquets around its wounds. Then he radioed back to the ambulance.
He was confident and quick — both traits Melander said his students need to graduate and work for agencies in the area.
“There always needs to be a next generation of providers,” he said. “We can't do this forever. And so we need to constantly be training the next generation to provide this essential service to our community.”
Merced College has been training students like Loureiro to become paramedics for the last three years, but it’s not just for education. The city of Merced is improving its fleet of first responders, and it’s partly thanks to a partnership with the community college.
Aside from that, county officials recently brought on a new ambulance provider, and every fire station in the city is now staffed to help people in dire need of medical attention. The effort is something Melander said is unique to the city.
“It's generally the larger cities that have advanced life support,” Melander said. “So to bring that level of service to a smaller city like Merced, it's a big deal.”
Fire, college, and ambulance ‘in lockstep’
Merced College started offering paramedic training in January 2023. The paramedic program is three semesters of intense classroom and field experience, Melander said.
During the field training, Melander said students learn how to treat patients in various situations, including situations involving amputated limbs or where someone is lost in an unknown location. If they’re not out in the field, Melander said they’re learning about topics such as advanced cardiac life support or what to do when someone goes into cardiac arrest.
While EMTs can only offer basic life support and assess injuries, paramedics offer advanced life support by treating and stabilizing patients. Before this program, Merced had little access to advanced training.
“We have one hospital in Merced, and we have one hospital in Los Banos. And so, for the first responders to be able to provide a higher level of care in the field, everybody wins,” Melander said.
Firefighters and EMTs, especially local personnel, are often the ones to enroll in the program, but that’s not the only change Merced made recently.
The county also changed its ambulance service last year, and the new provider, American Medical Response, took over in January. Prior to this year, the city worked with Riggs Ambulance Service, which had served the county since the late 1940s. County officials at the time said Riggs was out of compliance with state response time requirements. Most Riggs employees migrated to AMR when the change took effect.
“Almost 20 of our 60 medics are from [Merced College], and they've been great employees,” said Mike Swenson, the operations manager for AMR in Merced County. “They know our system. They're ready to go from day one.”
Most of the city fire paramedics also trained at Merced College, said Mickey Brunelli, division chief of emergency medical services for Merced Fire Department.
“The Merced College program has really created a reputation of being a premier paramedic training program here in the state of California,” Brunelli said.
Brunelli said this training was needed because firefighters do more than hose down a fire.
“Every incident that we respond to has a life safety component to it, and that's what a lot of people tend to lose sight of,” Brunelli said. “‘Well, you went to somebody's house because their house is on fire.’ We did go to their house because it's on fire… because there could be a life in jeopardy.”
Many firefighters had some medical training, but city officials wanted more of them to level up because timing is everything, and firefighters often make contact before an ambulance.
“The problem is the patient needs care from the time they call 911 until that transport resource provides (arrives),” Brunelli said.
The department applied for the assistance to firefighters grant from the federal government in 2021, Brunelli said, which resulted in sending 12 employees through the Merced College paramedic program. The city also transferred money from the general fund to buy equipment needed for the upgraded services.
“Everybody is in lockstep, and we are all committed to the same goal, which is providing the highest level of service we can to the community, to training the best paramedics that we can,” Brunelli said.
As of August, a paramedic is now available around the clock at every fire station in the city of Merced. Before, the stations mainly staffed EMTs, and trainees had to travel for advanced training. Brunelli told The Merced FOCUS it took half the time they expected to reach that milestone, and now they have their eyes set on growing to have a paramedic available on every fire engine.
Brunelli is proud of the college’s program and the Merced Fire Department employees who came out of it. He sees fire chiefs visiting from as far as Bakersfield to see what the college offers.
“They're seeing the caliber of paramedics that are coming out of a program, and frankly, they tell us ‘I have to see from my own eyes,’” he said.
Merced’s not done training yet
Firefighters in Merced, such as Joseph DeBruyn, are still enrolling at Merced College.
DeBruyn, 23, knew he wanted to be a firefighter after taking a field trip to a fire station as a kid. He does his job because he wants to be the person residents can depend on.
“The reason why I got into the fire service, the reason I got into EMS, is just being able to be there for people and help them,” DeBruyn said.
He appreciates that the Merced College program is so realistic, he said. When Steven Melander radios in a call about an injured tree trimmer, it seems like a real scene he could respond to one day.
DeBruyn is an EMT, but he wants to be trained for situations that a paramedic can handle. He wants to be sure, he said, that if he’s the first one there, he’s ready.
“A paramedic really gets to do interventions and skills that actually get to save patients and are able to make a difference on scene,” he said.
