By Greg Stanley
Naples Daily News, Fla.
NAPLES. Fla. — Collier County paramedics did not respond to an emergency alarm when an ambulance crew was late to the scene of 2012 heart attack that resulted in the death of a 25-year-old man, according to state investigators.
The Florida Department of Health’s medical oversight bureau, which has completed a year-long investigation into a county ambulance crew’s response to the fatal heart attack, also found that county officials violated state law by failing to report the delay to state authorities.
The county could be fined upwards of $700,000.
The findings help vindicate the family of Chaz Minard, who went into cardiac arrest and would later die at a hospital.
Minard’s father, Charles, has long maintained that paramedics were late.
Minard asked the state to investigate in spring 2013, shortly after Collier County commissioners voted to conduct an internal investigation of their own.
“The county messed up,” Minard said. “This tells me they had something to hide, or why wouldn’t they report and file what they were supposed to report? It’s obvious they did wrong.”
County EMS officials have denied any wrongdoing and county attorneys have asked commissioners for approval to challenge the state investigators at a hearing before an administrative law judge.
It’s unclear how soon that hearing could take place.
It has been more than two years since Charles Minard found his son struggling to breathe but conscious on a December morning in 2012.
Paramedics were six minutes late to the scene after they “negligently failed to respond” to a first emergency alert sent out by dispatch, investigators said.
A second alarm had to be sent out after the ambulance crew didn’t answer the distress call.
The county’s own internal investigation, conducted in 2013, never found out why paramedics didn’t hear the first emergency call.
The crew was vacuuming the station and may not have heard it come in, or another radio channel could have blocked out the dispatch, county officials said.
By the time the ambulance arrived, Golden Gate fire paramedics and a Collier County sheriff’s deputy were at the Golden Gate Estates home performing CPR and attempting to restart Chaz Minard’s heart, which was flatlining.
Under Collier County protocol, fire paramedics aren’t allowed to begin advanced life support procedures, including techniques that regulate a patient’s airflow, before a county paramedic arrives.
Minard was taken to Physician’s Regional Hospital, where six days later, doctors said his brain had been deprived of oxygen for too long and he would never wake up. The family decided to take him off life support.
Charles Minard believes his son would be alive today if crews had left the station on time.
“Thirteen minutes is a long time to go without oxygen,” he said.
But it isn’t certain that an ambulance could have saved Minard’s life.
By county design, fire crews are meant to be first on scene of medical emergencies to begin basic life support, like CPR, county EMS Chief Walter Kopka has said.
Kopka couldn’t be reached for comment Monday.
The county could be fined $1,000 for the delayed response.
But what could be more costly to county coffers is that inspectors said county EMS officials never told the health department about the violation.
By law, the county could be fined up to $1,000 for each day over the last two years it didn’t report the incident, attorney Jeff Klatzkow warned commissioners in a memo.
“Should the state prevail, the county’s monetary exposure could exceed $700,000,” Klatzkow wrote.
©2015 the Naples Daily News (Naples, Fla.)