Three more ambulances to be ready in three weeks
By Amy Leigh Womack
Northwest Florida Daily News (Fort Walton Beach, Florida)
Copyright 2006 Northwest Florida Daily News
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News
FORT WALTON BEACH, Fla. — No ambulance was available in Okaloosa County for nearly an hour Friday morning, prompting ambulances to come from neighboring counties to help two cardiac patients.
Okaloosa Public Safety Director Dino Villani said the county is trying to meet growth demands and shorten response times, but new ambulances and personnel budgeted for 2006-2007 aren’t available yet.
“It’s just a matter of going through these growing pains,” Villani said. “We’re trying to do the best we can for everyone with an emergency.” He said staffing shortages created by personnel attending paramedic classes and taking medical leave reduced the number of available ambulances in the county to six on Friday morning.
All six ambulances were busy on other calls when Helen Chaffins started having chest pains at White-Wilson Medical Center just before 11 a.m., Villani said.
One ambulance was transferring a psychiatric patient to Panama City while another was taking a wreck victim to Pensacola. The other four ambulances were busy on medical emergencies in the county, he said.
An ambulance from the South Walton Fire District was dispatched to White-Wilson, with an estimated 30-minute travel time. But an Okaloosa ambulance became available in the meantime and arrived there at 11:20 a.m.
That meant it took 33 minutes for Chaffins to travel the 100 yards from White-Wilson to Fort Walton Beach Medical Center’s emergency room.
Chaffins’ daughter, Carol Johnston said she was thankful for the quick response of Fort Walton Beach firefighter-paramedics.
“My mother got the care she was looking for,” Johnston said. “They stopped it from progressing.”
Later at the emergency room, Johnston said her mother was in stable condition.
At about 11 a.m., another person was having chest pains in Florosa.
Villani said an ambulance from Santa Rosa County arrived 23 minutes later to take that person to a hospital.
He said a seventh ambulance was on the road by 1:10 p.m. Friday and two more were expected to be available at 7 p.m.
Lengthy response times are nothing new for Okaloosa EMS.
Although the agency strives to maintain an average response time of eight minutes, a Daily News story published in March showed that patients have waited as long as 30 to 45 minutes for an ambulance, according to dispatch records.
Records show that there were 121 times in 2005 when, like Friday morning, no ambulance was immediately available to respond to emergencies.
In March, Villani said he planned to ask the county for more funding for staff and ambulances in the 2006-2007 budget.
“We received everything we asked for,” Villani said.
With money in the new budget, he said three more ambulances will be delivered and ready to go in three weeks if employees have been hired to staff them.
“We’re doing interviews,” Villani said. “We’ve been consistently taking applications.”
One of the ambulances will be full-service while the other two will only take people from one hospital to another.
But even with the new vehicles, Villani said there might be times when people will have to wait 30 minutes for an ambulance.
“Unfortunately you can’t predict the times when the system will be taxed,” he said. “We can’t predict what the day will bring us.