The world premiere took place last week of a stunning film about a precedent-setting medical service that began in Pittsburgh's Hill District and evolved into today's widely encompassing emergency medical services.

The University of Pittsburgh and the Hill House Association hosted the event, attended by some 600 of Pittsburgh's supporters, beneficiaries and past staff of Freedom House ambulance services. Present and honored was Gene Starzenski, who produced the film on a shoestring, with help from the University of Pittsburgh.

Prior to Freedom House, victims of medical emergencies, particularly on the Hill, were generally picked up by the police, bundled into the back of a cruiser and hauled off to the nearest hospital. No care was rendered on the way. Some didn't make it.

Cognizant of the injustice of this lack of care, as well as its inconsistency with the medical mission, the late Dr. Peter Safar of the University of Pittsburgh Medical School and then Maurice Falk Medical Fund president Philip B. Hallen, who attended last week's event, established the Freedom House ambulance services. Pittsburgh doctors took unemployed African-American men off the streets, trained them to revolutionary levels of medical competence and turned them loose to provide services to the city's underserved medical emergency victims.

The program was successful in all ways. People who would previously have died were saved, Freedom House personnel were highly trained and gainfully employed, and, eventually, the program became a model for the establishment of emergency medical services across the country. Freedom House provided services on the Hill and the North Side from 1967 to 1975.

Unfortunately, Freedom House came to a sticky end in the Pittsburgh of its time. The then mayor, the late Peter F. Flaherty came to office with the idea of de-privatizing and controlling all city services, ostensibly to cut costs. One object of his attention was emergency ambulance services. The city took possession of the function, obliged the highly trained Freedom House technicians, whose skills were practical rather than academic, to take new tests and then got rid of nearly all of them. Freedom House staff were mostly African Americans; Mr. Flaherty's team, including the police, weren't.

In spite of its deplorable end, the Freedom House experiment, in fact, led the way across the country in the field of emergency medical services, provided in well-equipped ambulances, where care could begin the minute teams reached the victims. The heroes of the story were Dr. Safar and his colleagues, Mr. Hallen and other benefactors, most of all the Freedom House personnel themselves, and now Mr. Starzenski for having chronicled their story.

In a bittersweet way not uncharacteristic of Pittsburgh, it is a tribute to the city that this revolution in emergency medical services started here.