Submitted WME translation changes for US

Interesting. To me, a facility that guarantees that a trained emergency responder will be on site with first-aid equipment 24/7 isn’t really EMS by definition, but a form of urgent care.

So maybe the real question is what are we hoping to map with EMS. If we don’t care about the mobile aspect (which is 99% of what the term “EMS” typically means) and only about the dependable availability of full-time medical personnel and equipment, then we should probably drop EMS and Ambulance and say “Fire Station/Paramedic” or something like that, something that implies what we are actually trying to say.

My feeling is that empty offices with no equipment and rarely any people shouldn’t get an emergency medical designation, either Point or Area. However, I’d be completely supportive of marking such a location as an “Office”.

For example, one large EMS contractor is American Medical Response (AMR). If AMR leases an office for their people to rest, great, let’s name it AMR and give it a category “Office” which is what it is.

[EDIT: To summarize, using the category “Fire Station/Paramedic” instead of “Fire Station/EMS” would, I think, draw a helpful and intuitive distinction between an office occasionally used by paramedics and the paramedics themselves. We are trying to flag where a paramedic is likely to be, not where to find the organizational structure that hires paramedics.]