Long Beach Memorial Medical Center Opens New Paramedic Base Station
Long Beach Memorial Medical Center and Miller Children's Hospital on Tuesday opened the first new paramedic base station in Los Angeles County in 25 years, the Los Angeles Times reports. The base station is staffed by mobile intensive care nurses who are trained and certified to give paramedics instructions over the radio. The new Long Beach Memorial base station will handle about 600 of the more than 1,600 calls per month placed to St. Francis Medical Center's base station and eventually will begin to handle calls from the county's other 22 base stations. Long Beach Memorial was the last of the county's 13 trauma centers to have its own paramedic base station. Los Angeles County in July 2003 required all trauma centers to operate base stations; depending upon call volume at the stations, the county provides as much as $250,000 per year to the medical centers to operate the base stations. Long Beach Memorial officials expect to spend more than $350,000 annually for additional nurses and training. In addition, Richard DeCarlo, senior vice president of operations for Long Beach Memorial, said that the hospital spent about $150,000 on radio and transmission equipment for the new base station(Buchanan, Los Angeles Times, 2/4).
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