RIT Ambulance Corps Celebrates 30th Anniversary

‌

Submitted

RIT Ambulance, with members of the crew shown here, recently celebrated its 30th anniversary and earned several awards at a national conference in Philadelphia.

Rochester Institute of Technology is virtually a small city with more than 20,000 students, faculty and staff living and working within the “Brick City.” And no city can function properly without competent health and emergency services.

RIT Ambulance, the all-volunteer, student-run emergency service, recently celebrated its 30th anniversary of providing emergency medical care to the campus community. Team members also attended the National Collegiate Emergency Medical Services Foundation conference in Philadelphia where they earned the Striving for Excellence Award, a commendation given to agencies found to be benchmarks to which other EMS groups should aspire.

“This award is recognition for the dedication and commitment RIT Ambulance volunteers have to the entire campus community,” says Matthew Purcell, corps vice president.

The team also earned Website of the Year honors at the conference.

“Our website can be seen as a source of pride,” says Michael DePasquale, RIT Ambulance deputy chief of operations and website developer. “Creating the website was a challenge. We went from an uncoordinated paper system to a fully automated Web-based system to manage all of our training, e-mail, schedules, membership applications, call documentation and more. It was a great honor to be recognized, and I hope we can do it again.”

Since 2003, RIT Ambulance, which also includes faculty and staff members, has responded to an average of 768 calls per year. Student members are enrolled in a variety of RIT programs including pre-medical studies, engineering, photography and computer science.