HISTORY OF ST. JOHN'S EMS

St. John’s EMS began in 1982, providing service to the Springfield-Greene County area.

At its inception, there was no advanced life support level pre-hospital care in the Springfield area.

The city was served by two private ambulance services, which provided basic first aid and transport. Prior to that, area funeral homes used hearses to transport people facing medical emergencies.

“Early ambulances in Springfield had cots, first aid equipment and oxygen,” says Chuck Wollard, a St. John’s vice president who supervised EMS during its formative years.

As hospital emergency rooms became more sophisticated and larger, emergency medicine became recognized as its own subspecialty. ERs originally relied on staff physicians or interns who were called in only when needed – a far cry from today’s reality: three full-time emergency medicine physicians and a trauma surgeon in-house 24 hours a day.

As technology improved and more medical equipment became portable, St. John’s EMS paired technological improvements with intensive staff training to perform more treatments in the field.

Throughout the 1980’s and ‘90’s, many rural communities looked to
St. John’s to provide emergency medical service because no one else would. St. John’s expanded EMS to locations throughout the region. “We mainly saw it as a community service,” Wollard explains.

Providing modern pre-hospital care is expensive. In the last fiscal year, St. John’s provided more than $3 million in subsidies for its EMS and Life line services, a significant community benefit.

St. John’s is one of, if not the largest, hospital-owned ambulance services in the country.

“We are proud of the fact that we have built a level of pre-hospital care not found in most rural communities,” says Bob Patterson, director of St. John’s EMS.