The Division of Emergency Medical Services includes over 20 faculty members who participate in a variety of activities in online and off-line EMS medical direction, airline and traveler medical consultation, EMS research and education, tactical medicine, emergency preparedness, and disaster response.
City of Pittsburgh Bureau of EMS
The City’s Bureau of EMS is an urban municipal third-service EMS agency that responds to 65,000 calls for assistance per year, including approximately 6,000 trauma cases and 350 cardiac arrests. It provides Basic and Advanced Life Support, Vehicle Rescue, Technical Rescue, River Rescue, hazardous materials response, and medical coverage for mass gathering events. The Bureau of Fire provides first responder services, and the combined bureaus provide medical support for police (SWAT) and hazardous materials teams.
The City of Pittsburgh Department of Public Safety's Medical Direction is provided by Pitt EMS faculty, overseen by Medical Director Dr. Leonard Weiss and Senior Medical Consultant Dr. Ronald Roth. Our residents and fellows staff physician response vehicles, providing 24/7 prehospital physician coverage and online medical command for 170 paramedics and 24 EMTs of the City of Pittsburgh Bureau of EMS. Our trainees are in constant contact with the system's dispatcher and are monitored on-line by one of our EMS faculty.
Tactical EMS
The City of Pittsburgh Bureau of EMS and University of Pittsburgh have active Tactical EMS programs. The Pittsburgh TEMS program comprises of paramedics from the Bureau of EMS who work with the Bureau of Police SWAT as part of specialized teams deployed during special incidents. Medical direction of these programs is provided by a faculty member within our EMS Division.
Special Events
Our residents, fellows, and faculty provide on-site medical direction for mass-gathering events throughout the City of Pittsburgh, including University of Pittsburgh Football games, Pittsburgh Steelers games, the Pittsburgh Marathon, the Pittsburgh Great Race, major professional Gold Outings, and the Three Rivers Regatta.
Learn more about Pittsburgh EMS
STAT MedEvac
STAT MedEvac, the clinical arm of the Center for Emergency Medicine of Western Pennsylvania, is the region's largest air and ground critical care transport service and one of the busiest single-owned and dispatched air medical programs in the United States.
From 18 rotor wing aircraft bases and two ground ambulance bases located across Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, New York, and Washington, DC, STAT MedEvac flight crews complete over 13,000 scene run and inter-facility transport missions each year. Medical oversight is provided by Medical Director Dr. Francis Guyette, Associate Medical Director Dr. Christian Martin-Gill, and Assistant Medical Directors Dr. Leonard Weiss, Dr. Dylan Morris, and Dr. Thomas Doyle, who are all Pitt EMS faculty and graduates of our EMS Fellowship. Two clinical directors, seven regional medical managers, an education manager, and education and quality improvement coordinators round out a collaborative Medical Department that allows STAT MedEvac to be one of the leading critical care transport services in the world.
STAT MedEvac has a long history of leading the field of air medical and critical care transport research. Our team has led or participated in trials for the Resuscitation Outcomes Consortium (National Institutes of Health) and the Linking Investigations in Trauma and Emergency Services (LITES) research network (Department of Defense). In addition, we have conducted numerous trials, recruiting thousands of patients, resulting in changes in practice. STAT MedEvac has pioneered point of care testing, video laryngoscopy, prehospital plasma, whole blood and machine learning. Our team also translates quality improvement initiatives into generalizable knowledge. This has resulted in processes for reducing door to balloon times in STEMI, reducing end organ injury in STEMI through remote ischemic conditioning, and field activation of angiography for stroke. STAT MedEvac has also described novel practices such as real-time fatigue assessments through SMS messaging and transport of patients receiving mechanical ventilation while prone. We have been able to execute this research program through unparalleled collaboration with UPMC and the University of Pittsburgh.
UPMC Prehospital Care
UPMC Prehospital Care provides medical direction for over 35 ALS and 60 BLS/QRS suburban and rural ground EMS agencies in the Pittsburgh metropolitan region, each with a primary EMS Medical Director. System-wide quality improvement, education, and medical direction are overseen by Medical Director Dr. Vincent Mosesso and Associate Medical Director Dr. Christian Martin-Gill. A solid support infrastructure is provided by the UPMC Prehospital Care team comprised of experienced paramedics and prehospital nurses who serve as EMS Specialists assigned to each EMS agency and UPMC facility. The EMS Specialists liaison with EMS agency leadership and workforce, while coordinating support resources available throughout the UPMC hospital network, all in concert with the medical directors. A unique teaching and treatment resource available through UPMC Prehospital Care is the Simulation and Medical Resource Training (SMART) Unit, a multi-purpose mobile unit that includes two fully equipped emergency treatment rooms and a triage and control area, along with audiovisual equipment that makes it suitable for provision of mass gathering medical care as well as on-site training for EMS agencies.
UPMC Medical Communications Center
At the UPMC Medical Communications Center, our EMS medical command physicians provide a wide range of out-of-hospital medical command, telemedicine, and consultation services. Online medical command is provided to ground EMS agencies throughout the Pittsburgh metropolitan region and surrounding counties. Command Physicians provides medical consultations for all 18 STAT MedEvac air medical bases and its ground critical care transport team. Additionally, over 20,000 yearly medical consultations for 20 U.S. and international airlines are provided. These consultations are primarily comprised of inflight medical emergencies for domestic and international flights. In total, our faculty provide over 40,000 medical consultations annually.
Learn more about UPMC Prehospital Care
Wilderness, Search and Rescue, and Disaster Medicine
Pitt EMS faculty provide medical oversight to the Appalachian Search and Rescue team and the Pennsylvania Disaster Medical Assistance Team 1. PA DMAT-1 has been deployed to multiple national disasters including hurricanes and floods.
