Wilton Volunteer Ambulance Corps (WVAC) is an emergency medical service that provides 911 emergency ambulance coverage to the town of Wilton, CT. We operate two state of the art equipped Basic Life Support ambulances and a full-time paramedic contracted from Norwalk Hospital responds in an Advanced Life Support equipped flycar. All our vehicles are based at the Wilton town complex which is home to the town’s Police, Fire, and Public Works departments, as well as our own headquarters, which is easily recognizable as the house upon the hill behind the fire department. It provides a comfortable and convenient headquarters for our members. As our name suggests, we are a volunteer organization. We do contract with Norwalk Hospital to provide day time coverage during the weekdays, but our members are all volunteers and cover the hours between 6pm-6am during the week and 24 hours a day on the weekends. During those shifts, a crew composed of a Crew Chief and a Driver (sometimes supplemented by a third attendant) work in conjunction with a Norwalk Hospital Paramedic to provide Emergency Medical Service to the town. We have roughly 50 members, most of whom are Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs) trained to render care ranging from simple splinting of a broken finger to lifesaving emergency defibrillation using an Automatic External Defibrillator (AED). Wilton’s police, fire, and ambulance units all play major roles in the dynamic of an emergency medical call. For all ambulance calls, at least one police unit is dispatched and often arrives before the ambulance to begin rendering medical care. For more serious calls, the fire department is also dispatched to supplement police and EMS. While most scheduled crews respond to emergency calls together in the ambulance, WVAC adds another tier to the normal emergency response system. We encourage our members to participate in a system we call “Neighborhood Response.” Most of our members are actual residents or daytime employees in Wilton and are issued pagers with which they can hear and respond to calls. If one of our off-duty EMTs receives a call that is near to his/her location, he/she is encouraged to respond and begin assessing and treating the patient as yet another layer in the medical care process. This multi-tier response system ensures that every emergency medical call that comes in receives the most rapid, effective response possible.
