Minute-by-minute

by Jeff Schmerker

On Jan. 1 the county changed how it handles emergency transport.

Before then, the county’s emergency medical series department handled all transport — both responses to emergencies and more routine medical transport.

Now, routine transports are handled by the county Rescue Squad.

While only two weeks of data are available, said Greg Shuping, director of county Emergency Services, the switch up may be what accounted for a drop by just over a minute in county-wide EMS response times, from 10.5 minutes in November to 9.4 minutes in January.

“A minute is a long time,” Shuping told the board of commissioners during a day-long work session Jan. 17.

While shifting the burden of routine convalescent transport from EMS to the Rescue Squad may be helping to lower response times during emergencies, it is not a panacea for the county’s EMS quandaries. Response to emergencies by EMS personnel, Shuping told commissioners, is complicated by two factors: geography and population density.

The county’s four ambulance centers are well positioned to respond to the majority of emergency calls, which come from Waynesville, Canton, Clyde and Maggie Valley. However, a number of calls do come from outlying areas, some of which are remote and a half-hour or more from the ambulance bases — places like Cruso, Lake Logan and Max Patch.

Locating ambulance crews in remote areas would drop call times there — which now, for example, average more than 20 minutes to Fines Creek.

Problem is, siting an ambulance to a new area is costly: it takes two employees to run an ambulance, and each ambulance that operates 24 hours a day needs four shifts. On top of that, add in the $130,000 to buy an ambulance and thousands more to stock it, and the figure soon reaches into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

A recent Fire and Rescue Chiefs Council recommendation called for adding two round-the-clock ambulances to the county, with one station in Crabtree and the other in Bethel. The county could then partner with fire, rescue and law enforcement agencies to house the crews and their gear.

Shuping acknowledged that the endeavor would not be cheap.

Action will likely be needed sooner rather than later, said County Manager David Cotton. Recent figures show the county’s 50-and-over population is growing faster than the state average.

“The aging population will drive those numbers,” said Commissioner Skeeter Curtis.

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