Houston moved immediately. It shifted its emphasis from getting advanced care to trauma patients in the form of paramedic-staffed ambulances to rushing these victims to surgery faster. The city turned the clock back to the days before paramedics when fire rescue squads simply provided "scoop and run" services.
—Robert Davis, "It's back to 'scoop and run' for shock victims In Houston," USA Today, October 5, 1998

Most important is that MEMS guarantees its ambulances will respond within eight minutes of an emergency call. That's the critical period for saving the life of a victim of cardiac arrest, a severed neck artery, drowning, etc.

This is a far cry from the "scoop and run" ambulances that we are used to but that most metropolitian areas abandoned years ago — unskilled attendants, beat-up ambulances with little equipment and no overview.
—Robert McCord, "Chance to form a metropolitan ambulance service shouldn't be missed," Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, August 25, 1985

The problem has been that people who aren't medically sophisticated until very recently just didn't know what to do. There was no booook that could be turned to that wasn't designed to accompany some kind of first aid or life-saving course. Even then the print was compact and in the flush of the emergency, few adults had the leisure to scan the table of contents.

So parents and other adults, faced with a childhood emergency resorted most often to "scoop and run" syndrome, according to Paul A Cirincione.
—Karen DeWitt, "What To Do? Quick, Grab the Book," The Washington Post, October 23, 1977