Echo Ambulance will now have a supervisor unit on the streets in Jacksonville.
The Jacksonville City Council approved an amendment to the city’s ambulance ordinance on Monday to allow for the assistant unit to respond to emergency calls along with a regular transport bus.
The supervisor vehicle can act as a first aid unit, but will not transport patients.
ESDA Director Phil McCarty says it will just help the city’s ordinance align with Echo’s operations and add the language to allow the unit to respond alongside their ambulances if need be: “Our ordinance just didn’t have any language in there for that. This is just really amending that to allow them to operate it. It really doesn’t change anything. They can’t bill for it. It just makes it clean and brings everything up to date with what they are doing. There’s not a lot of changes.”
Echo representatives told the city’s ambulance commission last month that it will help assist new members to their ambulance crews by allowing their supervisors to be on scene and observe and further assist with training.
They also said it would allow the supervisor to respond to a first response if they were simply out getting gas or picking up something from a local store and happened upon a medical emergency.
The changes will be applied immediately.