Stanislaus County will seek competitive proposals from ambulance providers for the county’s exclusive response zones, and that could change the landscape of emergency medical response for years.
The ambulance company with the winning bid will be expected to partner with city and rural fire departments, which often arrive at the scenes of medical emergencies and start treatment for patients before an ambulance arrives.
Shorter response times and better patient outcomes are the goals of what officials are calling a high-performance, integrated response system, which places more emphasis on fire-service contributions and is similar to systems in San Mateo, Santa Barbara and other counties. The selected ambulance company will be expected to provide no-cost clinical training to fire agency personnel.
And the fire agencies will receive some dollars for first responder service.