Okey, But dont lets get off topic!What? first of all, usually the 24/7-station engines are staffed 1+3, sometimes 1+2, meaning there is the unit captain, and one to three guys. The other dudes are all the same, we have no engineers or such, everybody drives and dives, the shifts are rotational so that you go through the different seats not counting the captains's. One day you are the one driving, the second day you are the Smoke 1, and third day you are the Smoke 2. Then it starts again.
All the guys not counting the captain are comparable to the american FF/EMT. They aren't actually registered health care professionals, BUT nevertheless the firefighters man BLS-level ambulances. In the Fire College, half of the studies are nursing and providing emergency care, so by all means it is no "First Aid". It most definitely is professional medical care.
The only place where you see Firefighters onboard both the ALS and BLS, is Helsinki. In every other place you need to be a Firefighter and some health profession combined to be in the ALS. Or actually, in other places it can be that the other one is a firefighter, thus he has only BLS-level medicine permits, but the other one is a Nurse, for example, thus having also permits for the ALS-level. But you get the point. In helsinki both are firefighters, unlike in the rest of the country.
Then there are the Volunteer Companies. They have the same idea in staffing that there is the captain, and after him are the driver, smoke1, smoke2, smoke3 and smoke4. The "smokes" can be also called only by numbers, 1,2,3 and 4 and such.
However, due to the nature of the volunteer companies, you can't always have the normal staffing, so sometimes the engine starts with 1+3, sometimes it can start with 1+5, with few guys sitting on top of each other in case of something big. On the radio, I've heard many times of stafffings like 1+21. However, the volunteers are NOT using "A fucking BUS?", like the battallion chief once asked, but merely staff the engine to the brim, and then bring the rest of the guys with the personnel carrier. Because the personnel carrier is not counted as a unit, it only counts as an "additional", so it is "glued" to the UNIT that the engine and its crew form. Ladders, Water tenders and boats and the likes are also only "additionals", thus a ladder for example is always attached to some UNIT. A UNIT is a engine with atleast 1+3 staffing, what the ladder does not have, it is only 0+1.
With the volunteer companies, it can happen that someone in the rig is providing only basic aid, in case not all the guys have gone through the whole training program, but there is always someone on board who know about emergency care, usually atleast two.
And even then, they still provide oxygen treatment, IV-ringer, adrenalin, glukowhatevers, painkillers, defibrillators and such, so it can't be called just "first aid".
It CAN happen of course that there are registered health care professionals sitting in the engine due they being nurses and Firefighters at the same time, for example, but here in Finland, (what a shame I think), due to many bureucratical reasons, the Firefighters are not registered health care professionals, but they do however provide health care. It is a big mess, and I don't even understand fully, so don't ask why or how.
But, we only have two kind of people on board the truck. Firefighters and the Captain. That is it. I know that in Helsinki, the Capital, there are some weird setups of NURSES OR DOCTORS or whatever on board the engine, but let's not talk about that, cause I'm not the one knowing enough.
Really greate sirens and the models in the vid. !
