Make plans to attend:

Public meeting to discuss community paramedicine

5:30 p.m. Monday, Jan. 13, 2014

Community Center in Frederick

 

By Cole T. Adema

NREMT-Paramedic & Frederick Area Ambulance Service Director

 

I grew up in the Frederick area. I consider it my hometown. And I care about its residents.

I have lived in a few other towns in the upper Midwest, working with their emergency medical, fire, and rescue responders and soaking up every bit of knowledge I could about how to (and how not to) make an ambulance service work and meet the needs of its customers.

Across the country, local volunteer departments (both fire and ambulance) are hurting for active members. Call volume has not decreased, but the workforce certainly has. Even  in Frederick, we can remember when there was a healthy roster and always someone available to answer the call. But responders have moved away, gotten older, and had life events change their ability or desire to drop everything at the sound of a pager. A few certified friends and neighbors do their absolute best, and a small handful of dedicated students are putting in hours to become certified, but there is a common thread between each one of these people—they all have a full-time job.

If you have considered becoming an EMT or a firefighter but declined because you were “too busy,” please know that every one of those who have stepped up to the plate is just as busy as you. Different busy, perhaps, but busy all the same.

That aside, the difficulty in staffing the ambulance with volunteers from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays remains. It isn’t that these folks (including myself) don’t want to be available 24/7 for ambulance and fire calls, but the rent keeps coming due and groceries aren’t free.

 

Aging at home a difficult goal

Let’s pause that discussion for a moment and move to another challenge facing Frederick and the surrounding townships. Many small communities have access to a clinic, an assisted living facility, a nursing home, or any combination of the three. We do not have this luxury. Understandably, for financial or personal reasons, many of our parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents want to stay living at home as they age. And who wouldn’t? And we don’t like the idea of shipping them off to the “home” any more than they do.

Most of the ambulance calls in and around Frederick are to assist the elderly. But what if we could help prevent illness and injury and equip our loved ones to keep living healthy and happy lives at home?

Better yet, what if there was one potential solution to both of these troubles?

 

A new strategy: community paramedicine

Enter the developing community paramedicine model. Community paramedicine is an emerging role in rural health care that centers on prevention and keeping citizens, or clients, healthy at home. In turn, this decreases the number of emergency transports to the hospital.

It fills the gaps between public health and home health, and with the evolving government monster of health care regulation, reimbursement, and insurance, coupled with the potential shortage of primary care providers looming on the horizon, there is certainly a need.

The needs of each community will be different, but community paramedics could provide services such as immunization, wound care, routine follow-up after recent hospitalization or surgery, simple sutures, chemical dependency aid, and care for the chronically ill. The list could also include screening, management and referral for hypertension, diabetes, depression, mediation compliance, nutrition, and fall risk.

In Frederick and the surrounding townships, one properly trained paramedic and one properly trained EMT could make house calls focusing on the items listed above and other needs during the work week and simultaneously be on call and ready for immediate response to 911 calls. Volunteers would sign up for shifts and respond to 911 calls at night and on weekends, when they are not otherwise employed.

The Frederick Area Ambulance Service medical director wholeheartedly supports this idea, but the real question is do you support it. Will the population in Frederick and the surrounding townships prioritize the need and get behind a proposal to invest in a community paramedicine program?

This will be a long road, but we have a plan for some first steps with the proper community backing. These steps include incorporating the ambulance service and fire department together and voting to form a taxing district (as many surrounding departments have done). Everyone in the community must work together.

A public meeting is planned for 5:30 p.m. Monday, Jan. 13, 2014, to discuss this and related issues.

Please think about your family, friends, and neighbors, talk with them, ask questions, seek answers, and then come to the meeting so we can tackle the issue as a united community.

 

Call or e-mail Cole Adema with questions or feedback: (605) 252-0317 or editorsnotebook@nvc.net.