Originally Posted by
peterb
Whereas in a rural area with volunteer squads, response times can be a LOT longer. In small towns around here the station is empty until there’s a call. Volunteers get paged, have to leave home or work and drive to the station, get the rig, and respond to the scene. My town was too small to have its own ambulance and relied on a regional service based a couple of towns away.
Once on scene, some towns in our region have a 30-45 minute transport time to a trauma center, and that might be with a volunteer BLS crew that doesn’t see many serious calls.
It’s a fact of rural life that surprises a lot of folks who move there from urban areas.