PARAMEDICS TO RIDE WITH FIRETRUCKS ON TEST BASIS.

Byline: Sabrina Decker Staff Writer

As part of a continuing effort to pare down emergency response time, firetrucks responding to emergency calls in the city will soon have a paramedic riding with the rest of the crew, officials said Friday.

As of January, Ventura County Fire Department trucks in Thousand Oaks will begin the pilot ``medic-engine'' program that could be expanded to Simi Valley and other areas, Ventura County Fire Chief Bob Roper said.

The new program augments one put in place in February that allows ambulances to be dispatched directly by fire stations, rather than having the information relayed to the ambulance companies, cutting response time up to one minute, officials said.

``What we're doing is just watching the data,'' Roper said. ``The overall goal is to improve patient care. ... We saw there was room for improvement.''

Roper said the programs seek to address the fact that 80 percent of the emergency calls most fire stations receive are for medical emergencies.

Thousand Oaks currently has two paramedics on its staff, as does neighboring Simi Valley. The paramedics are county Fire Department employees, not employees of the ambulances operators, and they do not usually accompany fire crews on every call.

Roper said he wants to wait and see the workload for the ``medic-engine'' before he decides whether to expand this arm of the program to Simi Valley and other areas.

Under the initial pilot program put in place in February, Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley fire stations dispatch ambulances directly to the scene of medical emergencies. Roper got the idea for the program after seeing similar models being used in San Jose and the San Diego area.

With the new system, participating ambulances have been able to arrive at the scene of a medical emergency about 30 seconds to one minute faster than before, Roper said.

But so far the program has seen very little in the way of expansion. Of the three ambulance companies that contract with the county only Colorado- based American Medical Response agreed to participate, Roper said.

AMR pays about $300,000 to the county to have the Fire Department handle its dispatching, Roper said.

A spokesman for AMR would not confirm the cost.

However, he said that the program has been a winning situation for the Fire Department, the ambulance company and the public.

``In many instances, you end up going to the same calls,'' AMR Spokesman Mike Reynolds said.