By Ann Marie Bush
Topeka Capital-Journal (Kansas)
Copyright 2007 The Topeka Capital-Journal
All Rights Reserved
Topeka, Kan. — Helicopters circled overhead, ambulances and fire trucks were on the scene, and doctors and nurses gathered around tables or stood under shade trees at Willow Park across from St. Francis Health Center on Tuesday.
But instead of surgical instruments, most of them clutched spoons and forks and dug into baked beans, pasta salad and cake.
“We interact professionally all the time,” Ken Keller, director of American Medical Response in Topeka, said after he filled his plate at a picnic to honor community emergency personnel.
The picnic allowed emergency medical service personnel from Shawnee, Jefferson and Jackson counties to interact on a social level.
“It’s really nice,” Keller said. “EMS is still an evolving profession. The public doesn’t understand what we do.”
St. Francis Health Center’s emergency department and physicians from Bluestem Emergency Care PA hosted the third annual picnic in the park from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesday in honor of Emergency Medical Services Week.
Les Milan, who has been a flight nurse with Life Star since 1988, was one of the many EMS workers who enjoyed Tuesday’s luncheon.
“It’s nice to be recognized,” Milan said.
Ginger Graham, a St. Francis LPN who helped put on the picnic, said the staff had planned to feed between 100 and 150 people during the three-hour period.
Robert “Doc” Crane was honored at this year’s event. Crane, a paramedic, died in July 2006.
“Unfortunately every year we’ve had the picnic, we’ve had a paramedic pass away,” Graham said.
Last year, Ryan Ostendorf, 28, an American Medical Response paramedic who was killed in 2005 while driving from his home in Lawrence to Topeka for work, was honored at the picnic.
To honor Crane this year, staff members placed his photograph and a uniform patch in a frame and placed it in the center of one of the tables.