Watchung Rescue Squad

The Watchung Rescue Squad would like to take a moment to congratulate our members who are graduating from college and high school. We would like to congratulate our Recording Secretary, Shafaq Shahzad, who graduated from Rutgers University with her Masters in Industrial and Systems Engineering. The following cadets graduated from Watchung Hills Regional High School: Adrian Lui will be attending Penn State, Kaylee Yue will be attending Ohio State University, and Matt Atileh will be going to Case Western Reserve University. Cadet Nitya Kathiravan graduated from Rutgers Prep and will be attending UCLA. We take a moment to recognize the hard work of these individuals. They went through countless hours of training to go on 911 emergency calls. Most even obtained their EMTs while being full time students! We are truly excited to see you all continue to grow and thank you all for your hard work! Anyone interested in joining our EMS family as an EMT, Driver or Cadet please go to Watchungems.org.

On Tuesday, June 9th, we were honored to welcome 7 new members to our EMS family. We are super excited to have you all on board! Can’t wait to see what you all accomplish! ‼️Are YOU🫵interested in joining? Visit watchungems.org‼️

A huge thank you to Rob Winston, FACHE & WRS Life Member for teaching our monthly drill on Psychiatric Emergencies in honor of Mental Health Awareness Month. Rob has extensive experience in behavioral health, working as a psychotherapist and as VP of Operations of Jersey City Medical Center.

We learned about different psychiatric conditions, how to better respond to patients in psychiatric crisis, as well as how to better support ourselves and each other in the EMS field.

Congratulations to 2nd Lieutenant, Genevieve Nitzsche on her scholarship from the EMS Council of New Jersey!

This National EMS Week, we honor the dedicated EMTs, paramedics, dispatchers, and all EMS professionals who answer the call every single day. 🚑💙

Thank you for your courage, compassion, and commitment to saving lives in moments that matter most. Your strength, sacrifice, and selfless service do not go unnoticed.

Whether it’s a routine call or a life-threatening emergency, you are there when our communities need you most. Today and every day, we celebrate and appreciate all that you do.

Happy National EMS Week!

Today marks the beginning of National EMS Week that runs through May 23rd. Each day of EMS Week has a theme that represents the nature of EMS. Stay tuned for more information through the week. Today we start off with “Health, Wellness, and Resilience Day”. Let’s take a moment to wish our members and EMS personnel a Happy National EMS Week. Thank you for all the hard work you do!
Interested in learning how to help with a medical emergency?
Ask me how to become a volunteer!

Huge thank you to .bigworld and Alex Eristavi for hosting an informative training on EMS role in Firefighter Mayday. We partnered with to practice treating downed firefighters and worked on navigating their gear. This training enhanced our department collaboration and emergency preparedness.

To all of the dispatchers out there- thank you for being the calm voice that gets those in need the help they require! Thank you for always taking care of all of your first responders. HUGE SHOUTOUT to our Watchung PD dispatchers who we are truly lucky to work with- they are the BEST!

It has been an exciting month for us! We have officially received our PFX2 stretchers. These stretchers are fully automatic and have a power load into the ambulance. We are the first rescue squad in NJ to put this new technology into service. Thank you to our partners at for working closely with us and Ferno to have these installed in a timely and professional manner. Thank you to Ferno Sales Rep. Julian Brown for working so diligently with us to get these installed and in service, and also for providing training to our members.

This marks a significant upgrade for us as we were previously using fully manual Ferno stretchers for many years.

We would like to extend a HUGE thank you to for supporting this investment through very generous grants. We greatly appreciate the support and cannot wait to continue to care for the residents of Watchung with this new equipment!