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Who Were the Freedom House Paramedics?
Today, we are used to the sight of ambulances roaring past us on the highway, as emergency care is provided in the back by EMTs and paramedics. But before the Freedom House Paramedics team was founded in 1967, emergency hospital transport was provided by police or funeral homes.
The program was developed in a collaborative effort between the Freedom House Enterprises and the Maurice Falk Fund to make a difference in a primarily Black neighborhood called The Hill District. The Freedom House Enterprises was a social work and civil rights organization. They partnered with Dr Peter Safar, one of the 3 physicians who developed CPR.. The funding came from the Maurice Falk Fund (Maurice Falk was a Jewish philanthropist in Pittsburg) with additional funding provided by Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty project.
The head of the Maurice Falk Fund was Phil Hallen. He and Safar partnered with Freedom House to find Black adults to train for the new ambulance program to better serve The Hill district and improve the emergency health outcomes for the predominantly Black neighborhood.
How Were the Freedom House Paramedics Trained?
Together they developed an intense training program, lasting 32 weeks and including 300 clinical hours. Freedom House helped interested individuals complete their GEDs if they had not yet. From there, curriculum included basics of nursing, the new emerging practice of CPR, anatomy/physiology, and advanced first aid techniques.
Dr Safar collected all the data, showing the paramedic services saved 200 lives and responded to almost 6,000 calls. They then hired Dr. Nancy Caroline as their Medical Director to offer advanced training like intubation and IV drug administration for further advanced care.
Prior to the paramedics program, calling for help for drug overdoses often came with legal repercussions if the police answered the call. Fatal overdoses declined once the paramedics learned how to respond to signs of overdose, partially because people were more likely to call for help.
What Happened to the Freedom House Paramedics?
The paramedics experienced racism when in hospitals or answering the calls from white patients, who would sometimes refuse assistance from the Black paramedics. The Mayor of Pittsburg was also racially motivated to end the service, and declared a new service to be funded by the city. He then fired any experienced Freedom House paramedic with a criminal record and hired all-white paramedics in their place. The Freedom House Paramedics program ended after only eight years.
The Freedom House paramedics shaped medicine as we know it today. They are heroes.
Freedom House 2.0 continues the mission to recruit first responders from poor neighborhoods through the University of Pittsburg Medical Center.
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