Emergency medical services is a critical function of the North Platte Fire Department. In fact, just like the rest of the fire departments throughout the country; EMS related medical calls comprise roughly 88% of our departments total call volume. The City of North Platte Fire Department provides EMS responses with highly-trained professionals. Our firefighter’s medical certification level varies from EMT, Advanced EMT, or Paramedic. It is the fire department’s goal to provide advanced life support (ALS) response to not only the City of North Platte; but also to the citizens of the North Platte Rural Fire District, Lincoln County, and the surrounding counties we provide mutual-aid/tiered responses for. All FF/Paramedics operate under the State of Nebraska EMS Model Protocols as well as hand-in-hand with our departments medical director. A typical initial response for emergency medical calls is, at a minimum, a Basic Life Support (BLS) or ALS Medic Unit with 2 to 4 personnel. If needed depending on the type of EMS call or information provided, we will automatically send another stations crew with a unit to help assist the primary response district.

Yearly, our footprint continues to grow as we respond to assist smaller surrounding communities that are experiencing higher requests for emergency services coupled with a decline in volunteers. We work closely with these agencies through mutual-aid agreements to provide support where we can, all while recognizing our primary responsibility to our local residents. Many of these calls are either Automatic Aid or Mutual Aid/Tiered Responses as described below:

Automatic Aid – responses within Lincoln county in which NPFD is automatically dispatched for advanced life support to other fire districts. These calls include vehicles accidents with severe injury, severe chest pain, cardiac arrest, and other high severity medical issues.

Mutual Aid/Tiered – responses within Lincoln county and the surrounding counties in which NPFD’s response is requested by one of our mutual aid district fire or ems departments. These calls include providing advanced life support in which we intercept with a basic life support ambulance already in route to the hospital.

Our commitment is that you receive great care from our EMT’s and Paramedics, however, property taxes alone do not cover the cost of the fire departments ambulance transport service. The fire department bills for reimbursement for all medical calls whether the patient or your family member was transported to the hospital or not. Our billing for ambulance patient transport charges is handled by our administrative support staff. If you should have any questions in regards to an ambulance bill, please call the front office at (308) 535-6760.