A new, student-led group will now work alongside UNC’s Public Safety Department, Orange County EMS, and the Chapel Hill Fire Department to help respond to Tar Heels experiencing medical emergencies.

Last week, UNC Campus EMS officially launched its 911 services to provide additional medical assistance and peer-to-peer support for students on campus. This has been an ongoing effort since 2017.

From 7 p.m. to 3 a.m. Thursday through Saturday, while some students may be studying, catching up on sleep, or letting off steam on Franklin Street, others are patrolling campus or waiting for a service call.

“Starting around 7 o’clock, we’re stationed out of Campus Health,” said Ishan Khosla, a UNC senior and co-director of UNC Campus EMS. “So, it can be 7:01, if a call comes out, our crews start responding to them.”

Khosla said their mission is to not only provide emergency medical care to the campus community, but also to take a more “holistic approach” in how they address the wellbeing of students.

“I think that’s one of the most unique aspects of what we do – is obviously we provide high-quality EMS care – but being student run we get to address those issues and concerns that we’ve noticed and that different community partners have voiced to us,” Khosla said. “And I think it really allows us to be a unique and supportive option for our students and the community.”

Sarah Torzone, a junior at UNC and the other co-director of Campus EMS, said a student-led EMS service is something Carolina has long been missing.

“We want students to know that they’re safe and they should feel comfortable to reach out to us,” Torzone said. “We’ve been in the same kind of situations that they’ve been in as students, and we understand the struggles of being a college student. So, we do want to provide that peer-to-peer support and kind of mediate between them and other public safety agencies in the area and advocate for them on scene.”

Campus EMS’s on-scene work could include anything from preparing a student to be transported by ambulance or serving as an intermediate between police.

Since doing the bulk of its recruitment in August of this year, Campus EMS received 110 applications from state certified, student EMTs looking to get involved. Due to budget restraints and tight-knit operations, however, only nine applicants were accepted, bringing the grand total of the team to 15.

Assistant Director of Nursing for Campus Health, Michelle Camarena, is helping provide administrative oversight of Campus EMS. She said this group will not only foster more collaboration between emergency services in Orange County, but also provide faster care.

“What they’re providing, we hope, is a quicker response time,” said Camarena. “They’re located here on campus. They’re able to get to these campus locations quickly and able to offer a sense of compassion being fellow students.”

While Campus EMS’s 911 Response began just last week, with the very first night shift on Thursday, the student group has been doing community outreach for much longer.

Recent public outreach has included educating students on life-saving skills – such as CPR trainings, Narcan trainings and other bystander care – and helping with the university’s COVID-19 response. Since the beginning of the pandemic, UNC EMS has assisted Campus Health in contact tracing COVID cases and leading vaccine clinics on campus.

Now, following the death of two first-year students earlier this month, Torzone said the Campus EMS team is also undergoing mental health training to better support students in need. She said she hopes the presence of familiar faces in these emergency situations will provide comfort to those in crisis.

“When you are represented in medicine, you are cared for more,” Torzone said. “So, I think that makes us also extremely unique in that students can see themselves in us and feel comfortable sharing their concerns.”

Featured photo via UNC EMS.

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