By Chad Drury
Ottumwa Courier
OTTUMWA, Iowa — The whiteboard at the Wapello County emergency management office was littered with lines, words, parentheses, punctuation and post-it notes.
Yet, the brainstorming session began in earnest for creating a robust emergency medical service system the county can depend on.
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Over the course of 2 1/2 hours Monday, emergency management director Tim Richmond encouraged the EMS advisory council to list the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats with how the current system operates. It was a painstaking process that set up the council to create both short- and long-term goals starting with its next meeting in September.
One of the ideas that appeared popular among the group was performing outreach to high school students to be the “pipeline to the pipeline” for EMS, as Richmond called it.
“That’s really the game. It’s getting in the high schools. Everybody’s playing the game trying to get them into a trade,” he said. “But we’ve had trouble getting the pipeline primed because of covid. We’ve had some success with the internships we did, but those are grant funds, and that’s not sustainable, at least right now.
“So part of it is the sustainability and the initial education.”
Many of the strengths the group devised somewhat overlapped. Members touted the years of experience in emergency response already on the council, as well as quality providers, fire-based EMS and ORMICS, which runs the bulk of ambulance services currently.
However, interim deputy fire chief David Cronin believed there also needs to be more of an emphasis on how non-emergency response people can be empowered when possible.
“We’re already in like some of those higher-volume places like the high-rises, just doing general safety training,” he said. “So just implementing, or throwing out the idea of, would there be people willing to respond if there was a problem within the towers? You can make a call tree, but there are people there all the time, they’re just not doing those things.”
“People love a purpose,” Richmond said.
Many of the weaknesses identified with community engagement, the lack of “thinking outside the box,” as well as addressing staffing and communications shortages, particularly an emergency medical dispatcher.
However, some of the opportunities included developing a framework for community paramedicine, particularly for those who are frequent callers to 911 and don’t have a support system in place. There was also a discussion about expanding public transit, specifically 10-15 Transit, to assist non-emergency medical transportation.
Also, the group identified some threats, namely the cuts the federal government will be making to Medicaid in future years, as well as the imminent closure of Hospice Serving Davis and Wapello Counties because of the lack of sufficient funding.
Tom Maher, who was appointed to the council as a resident of the community, spoke highly of the Veterans Affairs model for home health care, because his wife experienced it for many years.
“The one we have right now that works the best within the community is the VA ,” he said. “We wouldn’t we look at their model of how they do things and start picking their brain? They’re exceptional.”
However, the VA service is funded federally, but Richmond said it would be worth looking at.
Peter Reiter, a retired physician, said those programs exist, but mostly in urban areas and are funded through insurance companies or health systems.
“The most important thing is sustainable funding, because it’s a lot of work to do this,” he said. “You have to contract it, or you have to develop your own model. It’s got to be here next year, and the year after that.”
The next meeting will be Sept. 3 at 6 p.m. at the emergency management office. However, a subcommittee was formed to dive into various data that will include 911 calls and ambulance response times, which will guide in the decision-making process.
“Pulling some of that data from the computer-aided dispatch is quite enlightening,” Richmond said. “So much of this stuff is just driven by data. We can’t improve if we don’t measure ourselves, and we’re going to start collecting data in the right way.”
What items do you believe an EMS advisory council should be considering when overhauling EMS?
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