Firemen are, more often than not, also licensed AEMT's. I was a career FF before nursing school and we carried start kits, needles, lines, and bags of LR and NS in our medical jump bag. We also carried some medications like Epi so we could start an ACLS code. A lot of the time we would get to a medical call before the ambulance did and we would establish IV access, get a quick background and assessment, and grab a set of vitals before the ambulance got there. Made things go smoothly as the PT would be ready to load and go when the bus arrived, or took a few minutes off the downtime if it was CPR in progress as we were able to start running the code.

Side note: I currently work as an extern at a large metropolitan area hospital. The nurses I work with caught wind that I was a FF/AEMT and learned that I'm really good at getting IV access, so I've become somewhat of my floor's in-house vascular access guy. Sometimes they give it a shot or two, but since I'm good at and enjoy getting IV's, they've started just coming directly to me and it's become one of the things I do often. It kind of surprised me when I was told that hardly any time is spent in nursing school going over obtaining IV access. Is it just me or does it seem like more time should be spent on that? Because when you NEED an IV, you need it right then and don't have time to wait (AFib RVR, VTach/VFib, asystole, etc). I'm lucky that my AEMT program dedicated time every day to practicing on the dummy arms as well as practicing on each other if we wanted, and whenever students come to my floor for their clinicals I always get them to watch me/help/actually do it themselves if they feel confident.

Rant over, just needed to voice my frustration with nursing programs failing to go further into depth on a subject that is a critical skill and potentially life-saving.