In 2021, a large fire in Northern California burned a small community to the ground. In the rubble was a small ambulance service that had managed to save their equipment and staff, but lost everything else. This would be the beginning of travel paramedicine in the United States.
Several years earlier, BPM founder Ben King had contemplated the challenge of mobility in EMS. Returning from a hunting trip to Northeastern MT, Ben drafted what would become the model for travel paramedicine. In the small community, he had been visiting a friend in Ben and wondered why he couldn't support his long-term friend by working a few relief shifts in the ultra-rural community. His friend was the only ALS provider in the remote county and was reluctant to leave the area for any reason. This issue and the subsequent solution were first tested more than a thousand miles away when Best Practice Medicine placed the first document travel paramedics in the history of EMS in the United States.
The service in California was in a jam; they had equipment, but most of the staff had lost their homes and were understandably occupied putting their lives back together. BPM offered this service to try a travel paramedic model, recognizing that there was no precedent, no case law or model to follow. It would need to be designed from the ground up.
The team at BPM gathered to build an innovative, thoughtful, and new approach to the staffing challenges of this EMS agency. From the beginning, we could see that, unlike our emergency and disaster response teams, familiar with short-term deployments to events like wildfires, hurricanes, and floods, this was a distinctly different project.
Ben's notes from years earlier asked essential questions, like, What do we not like about the travel healthcare industry as it exists now? How can we engineer out undesirable characteristics and develop an approach for emergency medical services that addresses concerns and criticisms associated with this model of healthcare?
This is where the BPM promises started for travel paramedics.
News about a new method to support critical needs in ambulance staffing spread through the EMS industry quickly. Soon, BPM began supplying travel Paramedics to EMS services large and small, from California to Massachusetts.