By Frank Lewis
The Portsmouth Daily Times
PORTSMOUTH, Ohio — The city of Portsmouth may be looking into having its fire department get back into the emergency medical response business. For many years the Portsmouth Fire Department actually operated emergency medical services, but got out of that business several years ago. Now, Portsmouth Fire Chief Bill Raison says he is considering asking Portsmouth City Council to consider the possibility again.
Fire Department Medical Response is one of the items on the agenda for this Thursday’s Portsmouth City Council Legal, Legislative and Public Safety committee meeting scheduled for 5:30 p.m. in City Council chambers.
"(Fifth Ward Councilman) Gene Meadows had asked m to come and talk to them about the Fire Department and EMS issues and things like that,” Raison said. “I think he wants me to talk about what we are doing with EMS issues.”
Raison said the subject came up several years ago, most likely around 2010.
“At the time we talked about looking into moving into fire-based EMS,” Raison said. “That’s something that we have continued to pursue.”
Raison said such a move is not something that can occur quickly, but he has done a few things to take steps in that direction.
Raison said the most frequently asked question he gets is, “There are private companies that do that. Why do you want to go and compete against private enterprise?”
“My response to that is, we’re dealing with issues of public safety, and one of the primary functions of government is to protect my life and my property,” Raison said. “And when it comes to EMS services, private ambulance companies have no obligation to be here tomorrow. There are some very good people that do very good work for private companies.”
Raison referenced a recent event in which Life Ambulance closed their doors, seemingly with little notice.
“The main provider of emergency medical service for the city right now is largely Portsmouth Ambulance,” Raison said. “And if they did that, where would that leave the citizens of the city of Portsmouth?”
Raison said because of the circumstances, the fire department feels like there is a gap when it comes to emergency services, specifically pre-hospital care.
“We feel like that is a gap we can fill,” Raison said. “But it’s going to take time to get us to where we can consistently offer EMS services.”
Raison said he has a lot of the firefighters have EMS and paramedic training, including some who work for Portsmouth Ambulance on their days off, and some who work for companies such as HealtNet, a helicopter-based emergency service.
“Those guys have skill sets that we could utilize,” Raison said. “But to be able to utilize them we had to have guidelines to operate under and medical direction and we have taken the steps necessary to acquire those.”
Raison said, if the city got involved in providing additional medical services, there is a scenario in which the service would be most beneficial.
“If you’re out here and there’s a car wreck, and we pull up and I have a medic on the truck, he has the ability now to take some action in that capacity, whereas in the past we didn’t have the guidelines to operate under and we didn’t have the medical direction to operate under. We have that now,” he said.
Raison said Dr. Brian Barhorst is the Fire Department’s medical director, a capacity he serves with the other EMS services in the county.
Raison stressed that the citizens of the community should keep in mind that the Fire Department is not in the EMS business, so they can’t call 911 for emergency medical services. They should call a commercial emergency medical service.
“Basically, what we have done at this point is given our people who are trained the ability to take action when they are at an incident, provided the EMS company isn’t there for whatever reason,” Raison said. “Maybe they haven’t gotten there yet or are tied up somewhere else, whatever the situation might be.”
Raison said a lot of issues need to be ironed out even if the city authorized the Fire Department to get into the EMS service, including the training of all personnel.
“I would love to have all of my people trained,” Raison said. “But that is an expensive proposition. I have talked to fire departments that have been in the situation we’re in. I talked to the chief in Marietta a while back. Marietta was like Portsmouth. They had fire-based EMS back in the seventies and eighties, and then they went away from it. And that’s exactly what we did. And then they went back to it. But he told me it took them 10 years to finally get everyone trained and ready to start saying, buy us a squad and we’ll start taking them to the hospital.”
Raison cautioned that the entire idea is just in the investigation stage and far from a done deal.