EMS DAILY NEWS: Local Cities Will Be Without Ambulance Service Next Week

COLLEGE STATION, TX - Beginning Tuesday, unless stop gap solutions materialize, thousands in northeast Leon County will be without ambulance service for the coming weeks, if not months.

The longtime providers of emergency medical service, a company based out of Palestine, can no longer cover the costs after years of service in the Buffalo-Flo-Oakwood area. Their deal — one that was essentially a free service to the area — ends Tuesday.

Now, it will be at least May — when an election item is voted on — until ambulances can answer calls to the thousands of residents and tens of thousands of drivers passing through.

EMS RESPONDER: London EMS Computers Crash on Busy Saturday Night

London ambulances' computer system, which controls all medical 999 calls, crashed during one of its busiest nights of the year so far, the Standard has learned.

The breakdown for almost two hours on Saturday night threw London Ambulance Service's emergency response into chaos, forcing patients to wait more than an hour for medical help.

Politicians have called for an urgent investigation.

EMS RESPONDER: NJ Sheriff's Ambulances Fill Void as Volunteer Squads Shrink

Passaic County's Sheriff's Department is the only one in the state that operates its own ambulance squad. In most other counties, the sheriff's officers do what civilians do in an emergency. They call 911.

"Why would you not?" Monmouth County Undersheriff Ted Freeman said. "Every town has its own first-aid squad. Right now, the volunteer services are doing an outstanding job."

The same can't be said in Passaic County, where, like in most of North Jersey, membership in volunteer squads has declined sharply with the onset of the economic recession.

JEMS: Why the U.S. should consider equipping medics with ketamine

Models of prehospital care differ across the globe, but the provision of adequate analgesia, particularly for extremely painful and complicated orthopaedic injury, should be a universal goal for all contemporary EMS systems. For many years, this expectation has been met in hospitals with ketamine. Now, the ketamine tide is coming in for paramedics in Australia, with a number of services trying it out. The drug was introduced to my own agency, Queensland Ambulance Service (QAS), six months ago. I’ll explain why your service should consider adding it to your protocols.

AUTONEWSCAST: Porsche Delivers Cayenne Emergency Medical Vehicles to Stuttgart’s Fire Service

Stuttgart. The City of Stuttgart has taken delivery of two new Porsche Cayenne emergency medical vehicles for the municipal fire department’s Emergency Medical Service. Today both vehicles, which have the radio identification names “Florian Stuttgart 5/82-1” and “5/82-2” were handed over in Zuffenhausen to Dr. Martin Schairer, Stuttgart’s Deputy Mayor in charge of law, public safety and order, by Thomas Edig, Porsche AG’s Executive Board Member responsible for Human Resources and Welfare.

EMS DAILY NEWS: Paramedics honored for rescue

Burke County, NC - A select group of Burke EMS Special Operations paramedics were honored with awards at a recent Burke County Commission meeting. The award ribbons, including the highest award ever given to a Burke County paramedic, were presented for remarkable service during a particularly difficult mission in November of 2008.

NORMAN TRANSCRIPT: Before they were called doctors, 11 were police officers

Robby Frantz, M.D., Buck Hill, D.O. and Terry Hill, D.O. are used to working in high-stress situations as physicians at Norman Regional Hospital. Dr. Frantz serves as medical director of emergency services. Dr. Terry Hill practices emergency medicine, and Dr. Buck Hill is an anesthesiologist. The fast-paced environment is nothing unfamiliar.

Before they wore the white doctor's coat and carried a stethoscope, they were Norman police officers who worked in the Emergency Medical Services unit. The Norman Police Department was in charge of the ambulance service from 1978 to 1995.

"We were the EMS division," Frantz said. "You had to go to the police academy and do everything a police officer did."

DAILY GAZETTE: Saratoga Springs will review EMS bids

SARATOGA SPRINGS — The city has received three bids to provide emergency medical service, two of which could add significantly to its bottom line.

Late last year, the city advertised for ambulance service bids as a way of increasing revenue for the city without raising taxes during difficult economic times.

GALVESTON COUNTY DAILY NEWS: City might end EMS contract with health district

GALVESTON — City officials are considering making emergency medical services part of the fire department, instead of continuing to contract with the Galveston County Health District for the service.

The proposed change could save the city quite a bit of money, City Manager Steve LeBlanc said.

Calls for ambulance service dropped dramatically after Hurricane Ike, leaving the city on the hook for $225,000 to cover losses from the 2007-08 fiscal year. This year’s losses could be even worse, although the city would still only have to pay $225,000, the maximum amount required under its contract with the service.

OH&S: MMWR Paper Explains 2006 EMS Decision Scheme

A Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report paper on the process and rationale used by experts who revised the American College of Surgeons' Field Triage Decision Scheme for publication in 2006 gives a thorough look at the decisions involved. First published in 1986, the scheme is an algorithm used by about 800,000 EMS personnel nationwide. It takes EMS providers through four decision steps (physiologic, anatomic, mechanism of injury, and special considerations) to determine the most appropriate destination within the local trauma care system. The paper was published in last Friday's MMWR.

BUSINESS FIRST: Health department to host nation’s first public health and safety satellite channels

The Kentucky Department of Public Health soon will launch three national satellite radio network channels dedicated to providing communications among public health agencies, hospitals and emergency medical services across the country.

The channels will enable public safety agencies to move around without losing critical communications, and participate in a nationwide two-way satellite radio conversation.

WXYZ-TV DETROIT: Lives at Risk? EMS Truck Shortage

(WXYZ) In a medical emergency, every second counts. So why is the city of Detroit having so much trouble getting enough ambulance units up and running… so they can respond quickly to emergencies?

Each day recently, Detroit EMS has been trying to answer all of their hundreds of runs without enough vehicles for their paramedics to work in.

So we wanted to find out why EMS is still short on ambulances if the city has a lot full of new ones.

NEWS CHIEF: Combining fire, EMS services must be considered carefully

In its Saturday issue, the News Chief reported in detail on the proposed merger plan for Polk County Fire Services and Polk Emergency Medical Services. The proposed merger will be studied in a pilot program in a station near Lake Wales, according to the article, but the criteria for studying the program were not stated.

EMS programs in the United States were mostly developed within the fire services from the 1960s. However, there are an increasing number of independent EMS services to the extent that public safety is often expressed as a combination of police, fire and EMS. The question of program quality is important to the consideration and is difficult to assess.

The public calls for EMS services far more than for fire services. The EMS service carries far more potential for legal recourse by the residents served because of the close personal interaction at the scene. Fire service personnel are more prone to consider it as a career decision, whereas EMS personnel more commonly work for a number of years and then move into other health-care channels. In EMS, it is often called "burnout" and is a definite problem in personnel selection and training.

The point is that "cross training" may look simple, but is often difficult in practice because the personnel are, in fact, quite different. Complicating the picture further are present attitudes of the area hospitals, which quite commonly either accept certain patients only or temporarily close their emergency departments to further emergency patients. This further stresses the EMS system.

Serving as an ex-officio member of the EMS medical committee, I can sympathize with the Polk County commissioners and their desire to seek efficiencies in operation of county services. In this situation, I think that basing a decision on a pilot program may or may not help in making a wise decision - unless the evaluation criteria are carefully selected and analyzed.

I believe that an expert consultant's analysis of fire and EMS services over the past several years might offer better information on which a decision might be based. In the end, the decision should be made on the basis of the best service for the least cost, and combining the services may reduce costs by a fraction but also could reduce EMS efficiency by an even greater amount.

BONNER COUNTY DAILY BEE: Questions raised over fatal crash response

SANDPOINT - Public safety officials in Bonner County concede emergency response to a deadly head-on crash on U.S. Highway 95 earlier this month could have gone more smoothly, but they don't believe the tragic outcome could have been avoided.

"There may have been a slight delay, but I don't think the outcome would have been different," said Sagle Fire Chief Rob Goodyear. "The patients ultimately were all transported with appropriate care given the nature of the injuries."

Goodyear's observation comes after a post-incident critique with agencies which responded to the collision and amid lingering questions from witnesses at the scene who said there appeared to be confusion over who was going to transport patients and in what order.

Kimberlee R. Dingman, a 44-year-old from Sandpoint, died as a result of the Dec. 3 crash in Careywood.

DENVER WESTWORD: Denver Health to City Auditor: You aren't the boss of us!

Denver Auditor Dennis Gallagher presented his office's long-awaited report on the city's emergency medical response system yesterday, saying that the information his team has compiled "speaks for itself." His choice of such a careful phrase to describe the scathing assessment is indicative of the bitter inter-agency politics that have hovered around the audit since it was announced ten months ago.

AZCENTRAL.COM: Public-safety column: Ride-alongs

Two firefighters play video games from the comfort of a pair of recliners, happily stalking each other with guns as they enjoy a momentary lull in emergency traffic at Station 27 in northeast Phoenix. Others prepare homemade shredded beef tacos - a firehouse dinner favorite.

It appears like a quiet afternoon, a classic example of the "Ride-along Jinx" that many journalists and public officials experience during observation runs with the Phoenix fire and police departments. Those who want to see their first-responders in action often get nothing more than a handful of routine calls.

WASHINGTON BUSINESS JOURNAL: Inauguration celebration seen as ‘opportunity’ and ‘nightmare’ for D.C.

The inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama will create an economic boom and a logistical deluge for the District, according to organizers speaking to Greater Washington Board of Trade members Monday.

Having as many as 4 million people visit the region in one week -- about one-fifth the number that typically visit the region in one year -- “is an enormous opportunity or logistical nightmare” said Jim Dinegar, president and chief executive officer of the Board of Trade, to more than 100 business leaders gathered at the law firm K&L Gates. Dinegar said there were requests for parking spaces for 10,000 buses, enough to stretch around the Capital Beltway and up to Baltimore.

Companies should plan for emergencies, delays in delivery of goods due to packed roads, communications failures and other infrastructure deficiencies, according to Charles Fishher, vice president of James Lee Witt Associates. “When you bring this many people into the area you are going to see some stress to the system,” he said.