County EMS: people helping people

Staff goal is excellence in service

When it comes to emergency situations, every factor involved can be the difference between life and death.

The distance of the EMS station, the supplies on hand in the ambulance, the training of the responders and accuracy of the report, and so many other variables can affect outcomes.

That's why Calhoun County EMS (CCEMS) has continued to pursue excellence in its service to the county by expanding its range, ability, and training.

CCEMS Director Dustin Jenkins and Assistant Director Lori McDowell, alongside the rest of the staff, have been continuing Calhoun County's long tradition of well-organized first response and initial medical care.

"Any person at any moment might need EMS," Jenkins said. "Every person here is smart enough that they could be a doctor. To do what we do, you have to be smart. Medicine changes daily, and we need to be able to keep up with it."

Over the course of the previous year, Calhoun County EMS received 3,382 incident reports that they responded to. There were 3,191 calls the entire year, averaging almost 8.9 calls a day, or 265 a month, for 2022, highlighting the responsibility that Calhoun County EMS bears.

As one of the few counties with four fully staffed EMS stations and eight ambulances, CCEMS is prepared for most emergencies, with over 70% of responses by CCEMS taking less than eight minutes to respond to.

"At a previous EMS conference for the last two years, in meetings that talk about retention and providing a good working environment, they asked who was fully staffed. Only me and another staff member raised our hands out of the two to three hundred people in that room," Jenkins said.

Some of the achievements brought under the current administration's efforts include developments such as the construction of a new EMS station to help increase their response time in certain areas.

Reaction time has also been a priority, as the station personnel are expected to be on their way in less than a minute during the day. EMS personnel are also highly trained to be able to give life-saving medical assistance at the site of the incident.

"Our goal is during the day to be out of the station, in a truck, within 60 seconds, and at night, within 120 seconds," McDowell said.

Others include the use of ‘live’ blood within ambulances, utilizing special containers to keep them at the proper temperature.

By carrying live blood, EMS physicians can help save people that would have died via blood loss. As one of the few EMS agencies in the state to carry live blood, whereas most carry saline or only parts of blood, this gives residents suffering blood loss a much higher rate of survival.

"The blood's really been the biggest innovation," Jenkins said. "In the past, most agencies in the United States gave crystalloid solutions, such as saline, which does nothing to carry oxygen. It may put volume in the vessels, but it's doing nothing. But now, with blood, it's dramatically increased our ability to treat traumatic injuries."

Communication has been a very big part of EMS operations and will continue to be so. But one innovation that will be game-changing for medical care will be a system called Pulsera. The new app-based system will allow those first responders at the scene to begin communications with the emergency room within minutes of arrival.

"It's a statewide initiative, but we are one of the first ones to roll it out completely. It's an application that essentially allows us to communicate directly with a hospital and let them know we’re coming. We can take a picture of the vehicle the patient was in. If it's a really gnarly fracture, they can know to activate their orthopedic care, and they can ask questions via video chat to evaluate a patient," McDowell. "They can actively talk to the patient, like checking for a stroke, to see if there's a facial droop."

Everything from getting live communications and directions from physicians to setting up the arrival time and answering questions from the patient's assigned doctor can be done through the app. This allows EMS personnel to make a seamless transition from the area of the incident to the ambulance to the emergency room, all with a clear through line.

"When we hit on the app that we’re coming, you’ll see them assign personnel in the hospital to that patient. You’ll see ‘Dr. so and so’ is their doctor and who will be their nurse, and you’ll see them call us as we try to extricate the patients."

There are even more developments from CCEMS that are showing how much the paramedics care for the people that they serve, such as CPR instruction programs via phone, new technologies like camera-attached laryngoscopes to help guide air tubes to the lungs, and increasing efforts to help recruit new EMS paramedics and increase pay for those first responders currently on staff.

"What those laryngoscopes do, is that when we intubate somebody, when you put a tube into somebody's lungs and breathe for them, before the video laryngoscopes, you had to lay on the floor and with your eyes look in their mouth and see the vocal cords and put the tubes through the vocal cords," Jenkins said. "At the end of the new ones, there's a camera that lets them see. It's a lot safer for the medics that way."

When it comes to protecting the health of Calhoun County, CCEMS is understandably resolute.

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