By Hannah Kaufman
Morning Sentinel
WATERVILLE, Maine — When paramedic Cormick Frizzell enters a home, he isn’t necessarily looking for blood, smoke or flames.
He’s assessing the things that could lead to a 911 call: Slippery rugs, empty fridges, uneven steps, unpaid bills. Medication without a pill organizer. Signs of dizziness or loneliness.
Frizzell works for Waterville’s community paramedicine program, one of only a few in Maine. But after an April 10 federal grant freeze, those programs are at risk of collapse. With primary care waning and Northern Light Inland Hospital in Waterville closing in June, community paramedics offering a preventive solution to the region’s health care crisis could be next to fall.
Losing the program would harm residents without regular access to health care, Frizzell said.
“I think it’s a huge blow to our citizens, especially as the program is getting used more and more. A lot of people in their homes may not get the services they need, they may not be following their medication regimen, which leads to further risk,” Frizzell said. “Losing that funding, I think it’d be harmful. We’d always be reactive to 911 — we could never be proactive, getting out in the field and helping people before they ever have to have an emergency.”
Because community paramedicine is still a new field, the majority of programs across Maine are funded through grants. Maine EMS sought applications early in 2025, and on March 12 awarded $103,000 in federally funded grants to Waterville Fire Rescue and Topsham Fire and Rescue, as well as $96,400 to the Portland Fire Department.
The grants were terminated by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, effective March 24, said Soliana Goldrich, community paramedicine coordinator for Maine EMS.
“The grant funds were important to both support initiating programs and expanding programs,” Goldrich said. “Without these funds, agencies will have to look at other opportunities to sustain programs.”
The loss of the $103,000 grant is crippling, Chief Jason Frost of the Waterville Fire Department, said.
“This is a big deal to keep people out of the hospital,” Frost said in mid-April. “And we actually had received the grant, and with that grant, we were going to put on a full-time community paramedicine worker that would really help with this area. And I was going Tuesday night to have it all signed and everything, and the federal government pulled it from us.”
Why community paramedicine?
Waterville’s community paramedicine program has served nearly 200 patients since it started in February 2024, preventing accidents that would otherwise put patients in hospital beds while matching people with health and social services.
The program employs 10 part-time community paramedics, most working eight-hour shifts when they have a break from regular 24-hour firefighting or paramedic shifts.
Amy Bertone, medical director of Northern Light Walk -in Care and Waterville’s community paramedicine program, said without other funding opportunities, the program will run out of money in six to eight months — crippling an already fragile health care system in central Maine.
“If we were to lose this invaluable program that allows us to be more proactive, the community would instead see even more of a reactive impact, such as an increased use of urgent cares and emergency rooms resulting in longer wait times,” Bertone said. “And increased hospitalizations, which would then make it more difficult for those to access such services when truly needed.”
The department transported more than 900 patients to Inland last year, but the hospital’s closure means ambulances will have to drive to Augusta or Skowhegan, straining emergency resources. Frost said funding a full-time paramedic through the grant could have conserved resources and hospital beds for those in dire need.
“That was something else we were going to throw at this big mess, and hope that it would help kind of alleviate some of it,” Frost said. “Because right now, a lot of times we’re picking up patients and taking them to the hospital, when really, sometimes they don’t need to be going to the ER. But when somebody calls 911, we don’t have a choice, by law.”
Community paramedics receive patient referrals from hospitals or primary care providers before setting up free, in-home visits to patients. While most patients live in Waterville, paramedics also visit patients in neighboring Winslow, Albion and Fairfield.
Frost said the program provides medical assistance for people who can’t leave their homes.
“We do blood draws, we’ll take vitals, we’ll take them to the doctor’s offices,” Frost said. “We’ll help people with med reconciliation, so if they don’t have their meds, we can go pick them up for them. We’ll make sure we put them in their pill bottles, make sure they’re taking them correctly, make sure their house is safe.”
That checklist is part of the program’s fall assessment and home safety evaluation, services that are increasingly important in the state’s aging population. Maine is the oldest state in the country, with 22.9% of the population 65 years of older, according to 2023 census data.
Just listening to patients can prevent future accidents, said Elizabeth Reeves, Topsham’s full-time community paramedic.
“It’s really about respecting them in their space,” Reeves said. “The most important thing is listening to them, because a lot of times, when a person goes to a doctor’s office, they either go in all dressed up and just flat-out lie and tell them everything’s fine, or they can’t articulate what it is they need or where their shortcomings are in terms of their healthcare. And so we’re trying to get to the root of that.”
Preventing emergencies through social work
Many community paramedics build relationships with patients after visiting them regularly over time. Frizzell said he regularly visits an 11-month-old boy in Waterville who has high risk for pneumonia and is often in and out of the emergency room.
Amanda Skomurski of Waterville, who takes care of the boy, said having community paramedics check on him weekly is comforting. Cutting the program would hurt his quality of care, she said.
“I like when paramedicine comes in and checks on him,” Skomurski said. “They come and check on him every Monday, just to take his vitals. They really get to know the faces, so they know his setup, and they know him, and they’ll get to come and see him. But cutting that: It will take away them coming into the house, getting accustomed to him.”
Those community paramedicine visits have equipped Frizzell to better respond to 911 calls when the boy has an emergency.
“It’s been great to already know him,” Frizzell said. “Know him when he’s at his baseline, but then also know what he looks like when he’s sick and what symptoms he typically is going to present with, and being able to hear his lung sounds when he’s healthy and then be able to compare them to him when he’s ill. It’s been really great to get to know a lot of the higher-risk patients.”
The boy is one of hundreds of patients to lose primary care when Inland closes. Losing that service is especially devastating for people who are unhoused, said David Sovetsky, director of Mid-Maine Homeless Shelter in Waterville.
Waterville’s community paramedics visit the Mid-Maine Homeless Shelter every Friday at 1 p.m., providing wound care and services. The shelter, which is open year-round, can shelter up to 100 people on a given night.
“It’s been invaluable,” Sovetsky said. “They provide a lot of wound care on any given Friday. They’ve been able to help with our guests, providing wound care to as many as four people in one visit. If some of our folks are sick, they can check on them and see if they need further care. A lot of times it’s treatment that some of our folks wouldn’t be able to get yet, because they don’t currently have primary care.”
Across Maine, community paramedics fill gaps in social services, providing cost-free care while helping patients secure their own primary care providers, housing and assisted living arrangements.
“It’s amazing what’s out there for free for people and they don’t realize it,” Reeves said. “Just matching them up with things that they aren’t even aware are available to them.”
Cuts across the state
Reeves has helped 600 patients since the dawn of Topsham’s program in 2023. The $103,000 grant was intended to supply her with a cardiac monitor and vehicle, which she currently borrows from other paramedics and is forced to return when a rescue call comes in, often interrupting home visits.
Still, Topsham is better off than most municipalities, Fire Chief Chris McLaughlin said. Because of the program’s success over the last two years, he said the town is willing to fund the full-time paramedic position rather than relying on grant funding.
” Topsham’s in a good position where we’re going to ask to have this funded and the townspeople can decide whether they want to fund it or not,” McLaughlin said. “But the communities that are just starting, this money is essential to start a program, because how do you go to your council or your board and say: ‘Hey, this program is great, but we have no measurable outcomes to give you. We have no data.’”
Portland is still working to collect that data. The city’s Mobile Medical Outreach program is a pilot program founded in 2021 to serve a large population facing homelessness and substance abuse disorder. The program had finally begun cycling toward community paramedicine in 2024, said Chief Sean Donaghue of Portland’s EMS and training department, who planned to use the grant toward community paramedicine training initiatives for 25 paramedics.
Now, progress is halted, he said. Donaghue said he hopes funding will be freed up again so his program can continue to move toward in-home care like in Topsham and Waterville.
“That’s the beauty of community paramedicine, is that it can move some of those interactions into a non-urgent environment where you can just kind of sit with someone and say, ‘How do I help you?’” Donaghue said. “And the ED can’t always do that, because they could have a lot of people in the waiting room, and they don’t really have the tools.”
Since he was released from the hospital in October, the 11-month-old boy in Waterville has been transported by LifeFlight and in a high-risk ambulance, and bounced between emergency rooms. He needs the regular in-home care that community paramedics provide, Skomurski said.
“They know where everything is,” she said. “They know we have animals, they know the setup, they know what door to come in. So I think it saves a little bit of time, if there was an actual emergency where he wasn’t breathing, if it was really serious — I feel like that would make it easier and save them time.”
Frost said the department will give a presentation May 6 to the Waterville City Council about what community paramedicine has meant to the community.
If Waterville’s program runs out of funding, Frizzell said many residents won’t get the care they need.
“It would unfortunately be devastating,” Frizzell said. “This is a program we want to grow, and offer more to our citizens. I think this is a thing that we do need in our state, more and more, so to have a big setback with losing our funding, I think, would set us all back quite a bit.”
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