(SOME) HIGHGATE RESIDENTS SOFTEN ON AMCARE ISSUE
By Gregory J. Lamoureux
HIGHGATE: Ever since the announcement that AmCare would be taking over as the service provider for Emergency Medical Service in Highgate, area residents have been demanding changes.
On Thursday evening, in a meeting involving the owner of AmCare, Walter Krul, those sentiments seemed to have lightened a little.
Krul said that they have seen about 10-15 calls per month in Highgate, with an average response time of 11 minutes.
“In the last month the average response time has dropped to about 8 minutes,” Krul added.
That improvement, according to Krul, is that crews have learned their response territory better.
Krul spent more than an hour presenting to the crowd of about 21 residents and five select board members about the progress his for-profit Ambulance Service has made in the last several months.
Krul said that his service has had “a lot of positive feedback” since they took over covering the town.
Some of that positive feedback came from one of Krul’s harshest opponents in Highgate, Eric Bessette.
“I want to say thank you,” Bessette said, “in the beginning, I was all gung-ho on response time, now I’m going to call 911.”
Bessette was speaking of a 911 call he made when his daughter gave birth his grandchild in July.
The reference to not calling 911 came because some residents are resorting to calling non-emergency numbers to have Missisquoi Valley Rescue respond instead of AmCare.
Jean Chevalier, a member of the Highgate Concerned Citizens group, doesn’t trust the data that Krul presented to the board.
Chevalier said her biggest complaint with AmCare is that they “rove around” the town instead of being stationary, say, at the Highgate Municipal Building.
“He refuses to do that because he has overextended himself and he is covering too big an area for how many crews that he has,” said Chevalier, “We want the Highgate residents to have a chance to vote on which service they prefer or split the Highgate area between the two services.”
“It’s easy for emotions to rise when you are dealing with a loved one. When you talk about people wanting to pick and choose, it degrades the system.” Krul said.
He likened it to a fire. Krul noted that if you have a fire, you don’t call the fire department in the next town over because you like the people there better. You call whoever is going to get there the quickest, and that’s what 911 is intended to do.
“We’ve seen the results of that, and the result is that it takes longer to get health care there,” Krul said.
Krul told the story of a caller that requested Missisquoi Valley Rescue respond to their house. He did not say where the caller was but said that Missisquoi drove by AmCare’s crew while responding to the call.
Through AmCare’s guidance, members of the Highgate Fire Department are also becoming certified in emergency medical treatment so they can first respond to the most severe medical emergencies in town to assist AmCare in delivering medical attention as soon as possible.
According to several area residents who spoke at the meeting, this was an option that the Highgate Fire Department had wanted to do for more than ten years, but Missisquoi Valley Rescue, their former service provider, refused to sign off on.
This eight firefighters who have chosen to take the course should be certified and responding to calls sometime in December, according to Krul.
Most Franklin County towns that do not have an ambulance in their town do have a first response program, including Bakersfield, Berkshire, Franklin, and Georgia.
“It’s nice to have so many people interested in helping,” Krul said, “you don’t get that everywhere.”
One of the biggest concerns that area residents had in switching services was the fear of a slower response time.
According to Krul, their 8-minute average is faster to most parts of the town than Missisquoi’s average was.
AmCare has also been staging an ambulance, somewhere in the town for about 14 hours a day, according to Krul.
Selectman Joshua LaRock chimed in, “It gives a little more comfort to drive through town, seeing AmCare, and know that there’s an ambulance in town.”
That ambulance crew has the freedom to roam the town as needed while they wait for a call to be dispatched, according to Krul.
The advantage of having paramedic level coverage was also a benefit that Krul touted during the meeting.
“We covered Field Days with a Paramedic, probably for the very first time,” Krul said.
AmCare is the only agency in the county that offers the higher level personal.
For many injuries, an EMT is enough, but for the more severe cases, a paramedic can perform life-saving procedures that EMTs are not allowed to do.
Krul mentioned that since AmCare has taken over servicing the Town of Highgate, Missisquoi Valley Rescue has changed their protocols for mutual aid in Swanton.
According to Krul, there have been several calls in Swanton when Missisquoi was already out on another call. To get medical attention to the patient, Missisquoi requested that Alburgh rescue is dispatched.
Krul said that this, in many cases, delayed treatment in what could have been a quick response for the AmCare ambulance crew that was just over the town line in Highgate.
According to Krul, recently there was a call in Swanton for a resident having a cardiac issue. He said that his AmCare crew, which was sitting in their ambulance about a mile down the road ready to respond listened to dispatchers and Missisquoi Valley Rescue’s crew respond, taking about eight minutes to get there.
Alburgh was dispatched into Swanton on Wednesday morning for a patient who was unresponsive. We don’t have any details at this point if Missisquoi Valley Rescue requested for Alburgh to respond, or even if they checked to see how close an AmCare ambulance was to the scene.
The discussion of having a GPS tracking system in all ambulances to know where they are, and who could respond quickest also became a topic of discussion.
Krul said that type of system could work well, but the technology in Vermont is not there yet.
“We’re far from seeing that,” Krul said, “Usually law enforcement gets that kind of thing before EMS.”
AmCare has four ambulances staffed at any given time, according to Krul. He said that they are not understaffed, but do have times that their recourses are stretched thin. In fact, he is considering staffing a fifth ambulance to cover their service area of Georgia, Fairfield, St. Albans, Sheldon, and Highgate.
So as the fourth month of AmCare’s 36-month contract comes to a close, it appears that Highgate residents are beginning to accept AmCare as their ambulance.
