Dr. Nancy Caroline, Magen David Adom’s first medical director, was a pioneer in the field of paramedics.
Dr. Caroline co-developed the paramedic profession in the United States and went on to train Israel’s first group of paramedics in 1979. Paramedics are emergency medical technicians with advanced training who provide a higher level of emergency care, including perform resuscitations. Israel was only the third country in the world to employ paramedics, greatly improving pre-hospital care and increasing life expectancy.
Despite having little prior connection to Israel, Dr. Caroline decided to move to Israel in 1976 after learning of Israel’s acute need to train paramedics. Dr. Caroline joined MDA as its first medical director and founded MDA’s paramedic training program.
Dr. Caroline brought mobile intensive care units (MICUs) to MDA to treat the most serious cases, and it was under her leadership that MDA’s medics began to respond to terrorist attacks and other medical emergencies within three minutes.
“We call her the mother of paramedics in Israel,” noted Natan Kudinsky, who was a member of Dr. Caroline’s first MDA paramedics class and the former director of MDA’s training department.
Before emigrating to Israel, the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine alum led the establishment of an emergency medical service in Pittsburg, PA. Dr. Caroline also wrote Emergency Care in the Streets, a first-of-its-kind textbook for training paramedics, which is still in use, at the request of the U.S. government.
Thanks to Dr. Caroline’s leadership and innovation, MDA is now a trailblazer in pre-hospital emergency medical care with 3,300 full-time staff and 30,000 volunteer EMTs and paramedics. More than half of MDA’s paramedics are women.
In honor of Women’s History Month, we celebrate Dr. Caroline, the paramedics pioneer who revolutionized MDA’s emergency services.
Photos of Dr. Caroline with a skeleton and at the Knesset courtesy of Schlesinger Library, Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
