By Josh Davis
Baltimore Sun
PRINCESS ANNE, Md. — A whole blood program will move forward in Somerset County, allowing first responders to replace severe blood loss in trauma patients and buy critical time before they reach a hospital.
The unanimous vote Tuesday approving a state grant to launch the program marked a sharp reversal from a month earlier, when Somerset County commissioners questioned the cost and local firefighters criticized the idea as another expensive mandate from Annapolis.
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“The goal here is to save lives, keep people alive until they get there, where they need to be, and make this whole EMS thing better for the whole county — and we all work together. Correct?” Commission President Charles Laird said to Deputy Emergency Medical Services Chief Cory Polidore on Tuesday.
“That’s what I’d like to hear. We agree on something, finally,” Laird added.
Whole blood is donated blood that has not been separated into components and can be used in emergencies when patients need rapid blood replacement. Previously, first responders in the county relied on Maryland State Police helicopters to provide trauma patients with transfusions.
The decision could signal easing tensions between county leaders and EMS officials following the county’s takeover of the service last year. Former EMS Chief Joel Dixon, hired in 2025, is no longer employed by the county.
The shift also contrasted with comments made during an April 28 commissioners meeting, when Ronnie Hinman, president of the Somerset County Firefighters Association, opposed placing whole blood on ambulances.
“Every time I turn around, there’s new programs proposed that’s going to be implemented in this county that’s going to cost this county lots of money because Anne Arundel County does it — like whole blood,” Hinman said then. “Nobody else on the Shore is doing it, so we need to stay away from it, too.”
“We can’t afford it, and that’s the bottom line,” Laird said at the time.
The use of whole blood in emergency medicine grew out of battlefield treatment during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, when the military began deploying blood supplies closer to combat zones, according to Matt Levy, a professor of emergency medicine at Johns Hopkins.
“They were able to show that if we treated this severe life-threatening condition we call shock … the patients have better outcomes,” Levy said.
Maryland State Police began carrying whole blood on medevac helicopters in 2023, but rural ambulance systems are increasingly seen as the most effective means of reaching patients quickly in remote areas.
Levy said hemorrhaging remains the leading cause of preventable death in trauma cases, with most deaths occurring before patients reach definitive care.
“We have to get that patient to the blood or the blood to the patient. And EMS is the perfect delivery system to do that,” he said.
The Somerset program will be funded through grants administered by the Maryland Institute for Emergency Medical Services Systems under the state’s rural health transformation initiative. Somerset County will receive $58,338 annually over the next five years.
Ted Delbridge, the services system’s executive director, previously told The Baltimore Sun that Somerset County is exactly the kind of rural area where whole blood can make the greatest impact.
“They’re rural, they’re far away from the closest trauma center,” Delbridge said. “If a patient is injured in a car crash in southern Somerset County … they are still a long way from trauma center, whereas EMS are there quickly.”
Polidore said demand for the program already exists locally.
“Twice in the past month, we have had candidates who have qualified to receive whole blood,” he said.
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