Montgomery County Launches 'Physician Response Unit'

Montgomery County has launched a new kind of emergency response vehicle.

The Physician Response Unit, a 2016 Ford Explorer with a “full complement” of advanced life support equipment, is now in service in Lower Merion, the Montgomery County Department of Public Safety announced.

The unit will be available int he area around St. Charles Borromeo Seminary this weekend, where Pope Francis is visiting and sleeping.

It will always be staffed by EMS-certified physicians who were formerly paramedics. There are three different physicians who will rotate the duty.

According to Public Safety:

It includes medical equipment that goes beyond what paramedics are trained to use, including advanced airway gear and field amputation equipment. It will be dispatched when requested by field EMS providers for Car or train entrapment where field amputation may be required, structural building collapses, Mass Causality incident response or chemical, biological, radiological or environmental incidents.

The impetus for purchasing and equipping this new unit was a particularly difficult vehicles rescue incident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike on May 27, 2014. The driver of a tractor-trailer was heavily entrapped and his leg had to be amputated to remove him so that live-saving medical care could be provided.

The county bought and equipped the vehicle with $47,000 in funding from the Montgomery County Local Emergency Planning Committee.

Image courtesy Montgomery County Department of Public Safety.