The city of Pinellas Park supports a plan by local firefighters to allow paramedics employed by fire departments to transport patients to local emergency rooms instead of a private ambulance-company contracted by Pinellas County
PINELLAS PARK – The City Council passed a resolution Sept. 22 advocating fire department-based medical transport be considered in place of the private ambulances that currently take patients to the hospital.
Pinellas Park is the first city officially to ask Pinellas County commissioners to consider the plan recently presented by two Pinellas County firefighters – Scott Sanford, president of the Palm Harbor/Oldsmar professional firefighters, and Jim Millican, a captain in the Lealman Fire District. Their plan proposes the 18 local fire departments in the county take on emergency and nonemergency medical transport, eliminating the county’s contract with Sunstar Paramedic Service, which currently is responsible for taking patients to the hospital.
The Pinellas Park resolution says the firefighters’ plan is a “viable alternative … but has not been fully vetted.” It asked the county to work with fire departments “to create and implement a system that truly represents the best interest of all residents of Pinellas County.”
“In essence, what we’re saying is we support our EMS to transport people to the hospital,” Pinellas Park Mayor Bill Mischler said.
He called the countywide system – in which both fire department personnel and Sunstar paramedics respond to an emergency – an expensive “dual system.”
“Say, our rescue (personnel) gets there first. They’re going to take care of the patient. Five minutes later, Sunstar shows up and they just transport. Why are we doing that all this?” Mischler said. “The county, they control the entire EMS system in this county. Our fire department doesn’t, no other fire department does.”
Councilman Ed Taylor said that the county had disregarded the two firefighters who had presenting the fire department-based plan.
“You have a workgroup that wants to come forward and say, ‘Gee, we can do a job that someone else is doing, and do it just as well if not better and do it for less.’ Why in the world would somebody not listen to them?” he said, adding that he thought the county was “protecting something.”
Taylor gave an “extreme example” in which patients were transported past a hospital in order to be transported there via a Sunstar vehicle. It would be better to have a system where patients are transported by the firefighters who are already by their side, he said.
“The manpower is there, the expertise is there, the equipment is there and the desire. It will work, it will work countywide,” he said. “Our blue shirts want to do it. Period.”
Councilman Rick Butler pointed out the cost inefficiency of the Pinellas Park fire department sending out emergency medical personnel on their own ambulances when they can’t transport the patients themselves.
“Why are we buying transport units? We could send our people out in a mini van,” he said. “I know my voters are smart enough to realize that this makes no sense.”
Councilman Jerry Mullins argued that the system could be unsafe as well.
“If it’s a life-threatening situation and you got guys there that could be putting you into the ambulance and working on you when you’re well on the way to the hospital, those few minutes may make difference in somebody’s life,” he said. “If it was me lying there … I want to get going. I don’t want to be lying there, bleeding or whatever.”
And ambulance services are expensive to residents even though their taxes are already paying for part of the cost, the council members said. Mischler said he had turned down an ambulance sitting in front of his house after he cut his face with a chainsaw, in lieu of his wife taking him to the hospital. Butler joked that he was the “ambulance” last time Mullins needed a ride.
“Transport me to Ed’s place, for that matter,” Mullins joked, glancing at the councilman who is also the owner of Taylor Funeral Services. “He’ll sew me up.”
Councilwoman Sandra Bradbury said the choice in who transported residents to the hospital was simple: firefighters who care about the city or strangers who “you’ve never ever seen in your life.”
“I want my firefighters taking me to the hospital if I go in an emergency, because I know they’re going to take care of me,” she said.
The biggest problem is that Pinellas County is “closed shop” mentality – an unwillingness to consider alternatives to how things have always been done, Butler said. Residents should be complaining about ambulance rates, as opposed to complaining about the city’s increases in the water rates, he added.
“Any time a patient is transported, there’s money involved,” Butler said.
Mischler agreed.
“I don’t think enough people in this county really … know what’s going on. We’re talking big bucks here. Not the 4 or 6 percent increase in water,” he said.
The Pinellas Park resolution, which council members passed unanimously, would be forwarded to other city governments to garner their support, City Manager Michael Gustafson said.
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