by: Carl J. Post ©2001 Published by: Jones & Bartlett Publishers In the final years of the Vietnam experience,a dedicated group of social and medical revolutionaries dared to make American acute care logical and better. In 1974. they tapped into 1.6billion dollars of big government money to make trauma centers, paramedics and CPR, specialty care hospitals and telemetry household words. About half of the nation''s 304 eligible service regions were given money to reorder and improve their emergency meicine and hospital capabilities. It was a good idea.It worked more or less too.Basic emergency care was a reality in almost all of those regions after just five years. Advanced emergency care was the next level. It did not come into being as a provenway of doing things by 1982. The EMS revolution had eight years to work miracles. It did more than most critics had expected. |