Lt. Daniel K. Kehoe, (Ret.)
Since founding in 1976, the earliest uniforms of the SVAA consisted of a member-supplied white shirt and blue Dickies™ brand work pants. There were no outer coats, or other protective gear (like fire coats, which came later, stored on the ambulances themselves).
The early members of the SVAA did not typically wear the state- and national-sanctioned EMT or MRT shields on their sleeves. The SVAA provided a round, yellow-background patch less than three inches across with blue edging and the letters S A. Members usually sewed these yellow patches on their own white shirts above the breast pocket, providing the only uniform look to their on-duty clothes. Shoes were a hodgepodge of work shoes, sneakers, and in the summer, even flip-flops. OSHA had only recently been established and did not intrude into the work and clothing matters of the early SVAA as a private enterprise, concentrating their first efforts primarily on commercial workspaces.
Although I cannot remember the exact dates, around the spring 1983 the SVAA got its first official uniforms. On a cold winter night, representatives from Sentry Uniform of Chicopee, Massachusetts came and measured all the members, delivering shortly thereafter new white uniform shirts, uniform dark blue pants, and bomber-style black jackets with Suffield Ambulance emblazoned on the back in reflective lettering. The uniform shirts had professionally sewn State of Connecticut EMS shields with the members’ official EMS-level rockers on the left sleeve, and on the right, the newly designed SVAA shield. Included in the distribution were name badges to safety-pin onto the front of the shirt.
A few years later, a new on-duty uniform was offered to members in the form of a blue jumpsuit with reflective grey striping, in the style of the recently established LIFE STAR helicopter crews. This was done to allow members to keep the jumpsuit in the car, and if happening upon a scene off-duty, they could quickly put on the jumpsuit. Besides being a safety boost with its reflective qualities, it also served to establish identity as the jumpsuits also displayed EMS and SVAA shields and rockers on the arms.
By the mid-1990s, crews asked for and received more casual and comfortable uniform shirts, including polo shirts for summer shifts.
For cooler temps, heavier denim-based duty shirts were allowed; a style borrowed from the fire service uniforms.
The AIDS crisis of the mid-1980s and beyond mandated the need for more scrutiny in what was worn on-duty, and how bloody uniforms were to be dealt with. Previously, members wore their bloody outfits home and washed them there, but after concerns about AIDS, Hepatitis-B, and other contagion scares, OSHA got more involved and required sanitation standards for EMS equipment as well as uniforms. This sometimes meant abandoning soiled uniforms in the Emergency Room (forcing crews to borrow scrubs to get home), and ushered in the use of protective latex gloves and masks, as well as minimal hazmat suits which are used in the field today.
As the SVAA grew and became a truly established and recognized public safety provider for the town, attention to formal or dress uniforms was paid. In the early 2000s, new double-breasted EMS dress uniforms with police-style caps and military-style stripes on sleeves and pants were issued to the EMS officers (a new hierarchy created in the late 1990s establishing SVAA lieutenants, deputy- and assistant-chiefs).
Soon after, nearly similar dress uniforms were issued to a newly created Honor Guard which had funeral standby and other public appearance responsibilities.
Occasionally, one-off uniform options were granted, such as pink polo shirts for Breast Cancer awareness efforts, but these had bracketed times for use and were not meant to set a direction for the daily use on EMS calls.
To better serve the public at parades and outdoor events, the SVAA Bike Team was formed in the 1990s and outfitted with noticeable yellow shirts. They could respond on bikes faster and into more places that the ambulance-based crews.
From early on, more as a function of stocking the ambulances with rescue gear required by the State of Connecticut, fire coats and fire hats with visors were available to crews, stored in a back side compartment in a few standard sizes. These were meant to be used by crews responding to auto crashes and similar hazardous situations where standard SVAA-supplied uniforms provided little protection. In practice, these fire coats and hats were rarely donned, as the fire department handled most extrications on scene, delivering the patient to the EMS crew at an intermediate spot away from the hazard.
Other safety clothing provided in later years (not regularly worn as a uniform but available on the ambulances as an OSHA or state certification requirement) included gloves, masks, face shields, and NIOSH N-95 masks for infectious disease calls. These masks were sized and tested for individual members (coinciding with a directive discouraging facial hair and beards for male crews) and used mostly when responding to high TB calls like the prison after the mid-1990s.
One uniform decoration aspect was the promotion of the name tags (later discouraged for personal safety and replaced by picture badges) and the service anniversary (10 year pin, for instance) and lifesaving pins (CPR call, LIFE STAR call, or PAT Team pins). Members proudly wore these on their white uniform shirts early on, but as the uniforms became more casual and less accommodating of pins, such decorative markers moved to their ball caps or were not worn at all.