Webb & Cinader intended the show to be a direct equivalent of “Adam-12” featuring fictionalized LA city firefighters and paramedics. The city wasn’t interested so we see the county fire department instead.
And history was made!
My email alert tone is the station 51 Motorola SCU tone.
Now that’s cool. Nerdly cool, but cool nonetheless.
In the UK, the three services generally stick to their own roles. If you were involved in a serious car accident here, all three would turn up. Who arrives first is a simple factor of who is closest, but the first responsibility of all of them is to save lives.
The police are firstly concerned with safety and directing traffic/closing roads etc. Then they want to know what happened and to find out if anyone was doing anything illegal. Statements, breathalysers, drug wipes, etc. If there is (or is likely to be) a fatality they call up specialists.
Fire and Rescue’s job is to make everything safe and make sure there is not going to be a fire. It’s also their job to get the injured to safety, which sometimes means dismantling their car to get them out.
The Ambulance crew, initially a Double-Crewed Ambulance will be supplemented as necessary. They only take one stretcher, so multiple casualties mean multiple DCAs. They can also call on paramedics with enhanced training and ultimately on flying doctors (who may arrive in a car).
Some ambulance districts have specialist crews that train and equip to work in more difficult rescues: The upside-down car at the bottom of a ditch; the cyclist who lands on their head in a forest, miles from the road; the person who falls off a boat and gets mangled by the propellor, to name but a few I have seen on TV.
I had a plumber once who used it as the ring tone on his phone.
Do you mean that the Los Angeles County Fire Department sends out trucks with paramedics/EMTs to 911 calls for medical care and then they have to wait for a private ambulance to transport the patient to the hospital or do you mean they do what some other places do and send firefighters with some training to certain ambulance calls strictly because the fire truck can get there faster? For example, in NYC firefighters respond to certain calls regarding life-saving emergencies because they can often get there faster than the ambulance, but the ambulance is not for transport - the EMT/Paramedics on the ambulance can do more medically than the firefighters can.
It doesn’t seem anyone has a perfect solution. In my state in Oz, the fire and police are state funded statutory agencies. Only in 1993 did the ambulance service also become a statutory service. Before then it was contracted to a sole provider, and before 1989 was, in part, volunteer staffed. Before 1953 there were multiple contractors providing service.
The history rather parallels the changes in responsibilities of responders.
But the downside of our service is that the one service is responsible for: simple non-urgent movement of patients, critical emergency response, and where it gets difficult - if there isn’t capacity in the emergency department, they are charged with continuing care of a patient in the ambulance. Which results in an entire vehicle ands its staff being taken offline for extended periods.
This has become a major political flashpoint.
But there has is little doubt that a fully fitted ambulance with two paramedics is a pretty good place to be taken care of. (The problem curiously is a shortage of hospital beds brought on by a failure of social care for the elderly and infirm. But that is a whole other question.)
We are pretty proud of our paramedics and their service. They are generally regarded as doing a particularly good job.
There may be some argument in favour of splitting out some less demanding responsibilities, but the converse argument is that for a fixed amount of money, this keeps the maximum number of ambulances on the street.
Planning for major disasters and having capacity is always in competition with budgetary constraints. Clearly having allied services all trained in some level of emergency response is going to be a good thing. It has been noted that very often the first responders to road accidents are the police. There just tend to be more on the road, and likely to be closest.