Pequea Valley Fire Department is excited to announce that today at 12 noon, we have upgraded our level of care from Basic Life Support to Intermediate Advance Life Support.

What is IALS?
Intermediate Advanced Life Support was a level of care that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s Department of Health approved in 2015. It’s a level of care that bridges the gap from Basic Life Support to Advanced Life support.

What does this mean for our community?
This allows our responders who are certified as AEMT’s or higher to provide a more advanced level of life saving care in the field. It gives us the ability to start IV’s, administer more advanced medications, and provide limited cardiac monitoring when an ALS (Paramedic) unit is not available or warranted.

We would like to thank our Medical Director Dr Reihart, Wakefield EMS, and New Holland Ambulance who have assisted us over the last year with the guidance and education to get our providers ready to go!

To our community, we would like to thank you for the unwavering support to be able to purchase the additional supplies and equipment to be able to provide these services and we look forward to be able to better serve you, the community, through this more advance level of care.

Currently we have six career staff and volunteers who met the eligibility to staff the IALS truck and we have an additional 4 who will finish up their training and testing in the coming months. We also anticipate to send several more members to class next year. With our current staff members, we anticipate to be able to have an intermediate truck in service several days a week and as we continue to train and build up our staffing numbers, ultimately have one in service 24/7.