Ten years is a long time to run toward hard things. Samantha Barakat joined Royal Ambulance in 2016 as an EMT working out of our San Leandro station. She didn't stay in one lane for long. Field Training Officer. Operations Supervisor. Talent Development Manager. Director of Operations. Each role was a version of the same pattern: master it, then ask what else needs doing. As Director of Operations, Sam touches every part of how this organization runs: the partnerships we hold

Tim Jordan has trained so many EMTs at Royal Ambulance that he stopped counting years ago. He has been here for sixteen years. He started before most of the people he now trains were old enough to drive. Somewhere in the middle of that stretch, the math got away from him. A name will come back to him out of nowhere, and he'll think, oh man, I trained that person too. "Almost every single one of them has gone on to do bigger and better things," he says. Tomorrow is his last da

Amelia arrived at college as a pre-med student, then quietly walked away. Four and a half years as an EMT at Royal Ambulance changed her mind. The story of how the job she took to step away from medicine became the one that brought her back to it.

California's inter-facility ambulance system is at a breaking point. A bill in the legislature could change that. Assembly Bill 1328, from Assemblymember Michelle Rodriguez, is moving through the legislature now. If it passes, it will be the first real update to Medi-Cal rates for non-emergency ambulance transport in almost 30 years.

I never expected to find myself giving a presentation on grassroots advocacy in emergency medical services. But last week that's exactly what happened. I stood in front of national EMS leadership at the American Ambulance Association's annual conference in Las Vegas and made the case that our industry needs community organizers as much as it needs clinicians and lobbyists. I'm still kind of amazed I was there. How I Got Here Hi, my name is Marshall Woodmansee. My journey in

Kirsten Bolanos built her career on instinct, showing up for her partner on the rig without needing to say a word. That same mindset now shapes how she approaches People Operations, solving problems quietly, often before anyone else sees them. From EMT to systems builder, she is still doing the same work, just behind the scenes.

Every February, we celebrate the Black Americans who changed this country. We talk about Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, about Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr.. We talk about scientists, artists, and activists. But we rarely talk about the men who invented the way we save lives today. Before 1967, if you had a heart attack in an American city, you didn’t get a doctor; you got a cop or a mortician. They’d throw you in the back of a vehicle and drive fast. That was

Transportation rarely gets credit when things go well in healthcare. Most of the time, it shows up as friction. A delay or a missed handoff. One more thing for stretched teams to manage. That shapes how we think about our role. We're not just moving patients. We're trying to reduce friction for the health systems we serve.

Before we ever spoke, Danielle Thomas mentioned something almost in passing over email. “I just want to make sure my uniform’s coming.” It wasn’t framed as a value statement or a metaphor. It was practical. But over time, it began to feel like a small window into how she approaches leadership, not as something separate from the work, but as something that stays close to it. The uniform mattered because the work mattered, and because she wanted to show up the same way the rest