Tulsa’s emergency medical service, EMSA, is rolling out two new trucks soon.
They aren’t ambulances with a fun paint job, however. They’ll be specialized trucks that can transport people to and from facilities where they must be on an advanced life support machine referred to as ECMO.
"It’s like bypass. Your heart’s not beating, they’ll run you through a machine that oxygenates your blood, cleans it out and then sends it back into you from a facility while they transport to another facility," said EMSA President Jim Winham.
The big trucks are expensive and just a few facilities in Oklahoma offer ECMO right now, but EMSA will find ways to put them to use.
"Now, there’s not that many, probably one a day. So, we took these units and made them a hybrid so they also do our bariatric transports," Winham said.
ECMO, an acronym for extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, pumps a person’s blood through a machine to add oxygen and remove carbon dioxide. It can help people with severe heart or lung damage.
