COLLIER COUNTY, FL – Collier County EMS personnel continue to fight off fierce criticism over their response times.

We got our hands on an internal report into one mishandled call.

The delay had to do with an emergency tone that responders are supposed to use to initiate their response.

But in the case of Charles and Elsie Minard’s son Chaz, the sound fell on deaf ears.

“EMS failed one way or another. Period,” said Charles Minard, the victim’s father.

Last December, Chaz suffered a heart attack.

They said 11 minutes went by before EMS arrived on scene.

They were 5 minutes late.

“Our daughter was screaming where are they, where are they, where are they? Because they took forever,” said Elsie Minard, the victim’s mother.

According to an internal investigation, paramedics said they never heard the initial 6 second tone.

The mishandled emergency call set off a firestorm of criticism.

Just this week, county commissioner Georgia Hiller called on the state to investigate a possible cover up.

EMS chief Walter Kopka stands by his team and technology.

“I’m very proud of what we do,” said Kopka.

Ems personnel use pagers, tablets and portable radios, and they rely on those 6 seconds of tone to activate.

“Is this technology reliable? Absolutely, and it shouldn’t be alarming to people because we have multiple layers of backup,” said Kopka.

For Chaz, none went off originally, requiring a second dispatch 4 minutes later.

The internal report names a number of possible reasons why, from cell service to crews vacuuming during the dispatch.

“There’s just too much going on with EMS,” said Charles Minard.

Kopka tells us firefighters still arrived on time saying the tiered response system worked.

“If any agency wanted to inspect what we do, I’m very proud of what we do,” said Kopka.

SOURCE

WASHINGTON, DC – The District of Columbia is losing paramedics at an alarming rate and they are not being replaced.

53 have resigned or retired since Kenneth Ellerbe became fire chief in 2011.

It is an exodus that has led to a critical staffing shortage with advanced life support units going unfilled every day.

The firefighters’ union has been sounding the alarm for months, telling D.C. councilmembers and anyone who will listen, the net loss of paramedics has created a “crisis” situation with first responders forced to work 36-hour shifts and advanced life support units left off the streets every single day.

Normal protocol has 14 medic units staffed during every shift. It is a number designed to make sure advanced life support is available within minutes of a 911 call in every ward in the city.

But as paramedics leave without being replaced, those 14 medic units have dwindled.

According to the firefighters union in 2011, two to three Advanced Life Support units were downgraded to Basic Life Support every day.

In 2012, the numbers went from four to five, and so far this year, it is averaging five to six downgrades every day.

“Pretty simply, the basic difference between a paramedic and an EMT is that the paramedic brings the ER to you in the first 20 minutes, so everything the ER can do in those first critical minutes, a paramedic can do for you in the field,” said Paramedic Joe Papariello in an interview Thursday.

Emergency medical technicians cannot administer drugs. It is a vital function in some trauma cases.

“There are a lot of drugs that we can give,” said Papariello, the Union’s EMS official. “Over 30 in our protocols … if you are having a heart attack or you have a broken bone, we can deliver those.”

But as paramedics leave, those services have diminished.

Take for example the month of April. According to the union in April 2011, more than 23 percent of the scheduled Advanced Life Support units were taken off the streets.

In April of last year, it was more than 34 percent, and so far this year, it has risen to more than 42 percent.

“And when we don’t have enough units on the street, units have to respond out of their areas that they are supposed to protect, and it puts a stress on the system and on the individual, and that’s why a lot of our medics are leaving,” said Papariello.

The staffing shortage has also lead to forced overtime. In 2012, according to the union, 185 times paramedics were held over for a 36-hour shift. So far this year, it’s happened 136 times.

Just this month on May 9, the fire department announced in a special order three more firefighter/paramedics had decided to resign.

“We are in a crisis mode,” said Union President Ed Smith. “I mean, in the 90′s when they were closing firehouses, you had firehouse roulette. You didn’t know where the wheel was going to stop. Right now today, we have medic unit roulette and I hope it doesn’t stop on the wrong person.”

On Friday morning, Chief Ellerbe will go before the D.C. Council’s Judiciary Committee where he is expected to testify about his ambulance deployment plan.

He declined our request for an on-camera interview.

In recent testimony, the chief told the council he plans to train current EMTs to become paramedics. But as the union points out, that could take up to two years.

SOURCE

NORFOLK, VA – Police say a man was drunk when he stole an ambulance and crashed into five cars in Norfolk.

Just after 11:00 p.m. Tuesday, police say 25-year-old Lamont Antonio Davis got into the private ambulance that was parked at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital and drove off. They say he drove down Colley Avenue, crossed the median and crashed near the intersection with Westover Avenue. He got out of the vehicle and ran off.

Carly Decerce’s roommate’s car was one of five vehicle that were damaged. She was inside their apartment when she heard a really loud crash.

“I thought it was a bomb or something,” Decerce described.

Police caught him a short time later.

Alison Stempel saw the crash.

“I’m surprised the driver was able to run away,” she said.

The crash also destroyed a lamp post.

Davis is charged with DUI, Grand Larceny and Hit and Run.

SOURCE

STAMFORD, CT – Nelson Ambulance, which provides non-emergency patient transport services for hospitals and medical facilities throughout Fairfield County, is the subject of an investigation by state health officials, Hearst Connecticut Newspapers has learned.

A former supervisor of the company said he has told the FBI that Nelson Ambulance is falsifying bills submitted to Medicaid and Medicare for payments. The ex-employee said the FBI also is investigating the company, which provides services to patients at a number of hospitals in the region, including in Danbury, Bridgeport, Stamford and Greenwich.

In an undated memo from a manager to ambulance crews, obtained by Hearst, a Nelson supervisor told employees that “we are not able to bill some of our medicare and Medicaid patients due to poor documentation.”

“Medicare WILL NOT pay for ambulatory patients or DOCTORS appointments,” wrote Denise Markavich, Nelson’s director of operations. “As this effect a good portion of our ambulance patients we ask the following. Please document that ALL patients were moved by sheet lift to our stretcher, even if the patient was ambulatory writing such will make medicare denie the claim. Also for doctors appointments please document it as a Procedure, not a follow up or Doctor appointment. This will secure billing rights for these calls.”

A Nelson official Friday said the company does not believe the memo is authentic. Phil Onofrio, a Nelson vice president who became operations director a few weeks ago, said company officials had never seen the memo and that there have been previous issues with a former aggrieved employee who was forging documents. Onofrio did not name the former employee.

“We need to do our own internal investigation on this (to authenticate the document),” he said.

Onofrio added that the billing practices outlined in the memo, “are not in line with the company’s billing practices, both past and present.”

Bill Garrish, a spokesman for the state Department of Public Health, confirmed last week that the department is investigating Nelson Ambulance, whose main office is in North Haven.

He declined, however, to specify the nature of the probe.

Onofrio said Friday that Nelson has been contacted by state health officials about an inquiry and “we complied with all the information they requested.”

“They did not advise us of the nature of the inquiry, but we have no reason to believe at this time that it’s a patient-care issue,” he said.

The non-emergency medical transport business in southwestern Connecticut is a fiercely competitive, multimillion-dollar industry. Reimbursements by Medicare and Medicaid — for taking patients to a nursing home or for a dialysis appointment, for instance — are a substantial part of that business.

George Previs, a former supervisor with Nelson, told Hearst he reached out to the FBI last fall after he was fired from the company. Previs said he was fired for refusing to tell employees to lie on patient “run forms” so that the company could get Medicare reimbursements to which it wasn’t entitled.

“Medicare and Medicaid have very strict rules about what they’ll pay for,” Previs said.

Medicare won’t, for example, pay for patient transports if individuals are not ambulatory — capable of walking to the ambulance under their own power. In such instances, an ambulance isn’t considered a medical necessity.

Previs said company officials would routinely tell employees to lie on patient run forms indicating that patients were “non-ambulatory,” even if they could walk under their own power, so that the company would get paid by Medicare for the calls.

“If you didn’t follow suit and do what the company wanted, you’d be disciplined for it,” he said. “They use strong-arm tactics to keep their employees in line.”

Onofrio denied the allegations, stating that billing paperwork goes through a great deal of “internal scrutiny” before the company bills Medicare for services and that a doctor has to sign off on the claim.

A spokesman for the FBI said he could neither confirm nor deny the existence of an investigation Friday.

But Previs said when he was interviewed by the FBI, investigators already had a wealth of information on Nelson Ambulance and confirmed the existence of an ongoing investigation into the company’s activities.

Christopher Godialis, director of the state’s Medicaid Fraud unit, said last week that the office has a copy of the Markavich memo, but he declined to comment on whether the document is part of an investigation.

“We routinely receive allegations such as these regarding many types of providers,” he said, “and treat each one of them very seriously.”

Federal officials in recent years have cracked down on billing irregularities by ambulance companies across the nation as part of their overall investigation into Medicare and Medicaid fraud.

Professional Ambulance Services of Norwich pleaded guilty in 2004 to one charge of federal health-care fraud. According to court documents, the company was accused of submitting clams to Medicare when the services were not medically necessary, including claims that patients who were ambulatory required the use of a stretcher.

The company was fined more than $1.5 million by state and federal authorities.

Donald White, a spokesman for the U.S. Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General, said fraud in government health care programs costs taxpayers more than $75 billion a year.

“Obviously we take these kind of cases very seriously,” White said.

SOURCE

CHATTANOOGA, TN – A man stole a Memorial ambulance that was at Erlanger on Friday afternoon while the driver was inside. The man was later arrested after the driver got him to bail out by yanking him from behind.

A call was received by Hamilton County 911 at 2:09 p.m. regarding an ambulance from Memorial being stolen from the Erlanger emergency room parking lot. Further information was that an employee was inside the rear of the ambulance at the time it was stolen.

The driver of the Memorial Hospital ambulance stated to deputies he dropped a patient off at Erlanger’s emergency room and then pulled the ambulance out of the way due to the amount of ambulance traffic.

While he was in the rear of the vehicle cleaning, someone jumped into the driver’s seat and pulled out of the lot into traffic.

He yelled for the man to stop, but he just accelerated faster. The victim was yelling at the ambulance-jacker and attempting to call out on his radio reporting the theft.

Although the victim was yelling for the suspect to stop, he refused at which time the victim reached through the window and pulled on the suspect to the point he stopped the ambulance.

The man jumped from the ambulance and ran towards the Whitehall Building. A short time later he was located in a red Ford van parked in the Whitehall garage.

John Edward Shanks, 29, was taken into custody by deputies with the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office and charged with auto theft over $100,000, kidnapping, reckless endangerment and burglary of an auto.

He was transported to the Hamilton County Jail for booking.

It was also found that Shanks has outstanding warrants both in East Ridge and in Catoosa County, Ga.

SOURCE

ALBUQUERQUE, NM – Albuquerque has 28 brand new paramedics ready to hit the streets with the Fire Department, and when they do they are likely to find themselves working in a brand new way in rescue units and fire engines.

For years the department has assigned two paramedics to each rescue unit. The plan is to split those pairs up, keeping one paramedic in each rescue unit and putting one in each of the city’s fire engines.

The idea is to get paramedics in more emergency vehicles on the scene faster, with new defibrillator equipment on the fire engines.

But a lot of paramedics prefer working in pairs.

“When I come up on a scene I’m with a lieutenant that’s also a paramedic,” said veteran paramedic Max Heyman. “He can control that scene. I can work solely about patient care. I can start that IV, I can do that 12-lead, I can intubate. I can do whatever needs to be done on that patient while I have the other paramedic over here to control the scene.”

Fire Chief James Breen says the new deployment plan will speed up the average response time by 47 seconds – about 17 percent.

“Because we going to be able to get a paramedic to a particular scene faster, they’ll begin their interventions quicker and we’ll have better patient outcomes and essentially more lives being saved,” Breen said. “This is one of the best public safety practices across the United States.”

The 28 paramedics who graduated Thursday won’t actually increase the numbers. They will replace others who are retiring or moving on to other jobs, or to other cities.

Albuquerque has about 670 firefighters. All of them are trained as basic emergency medical technicians. About 200 are paramedics, qualified to do more to save lives.

SOURCE

The ambulance was at a scene on Sandpit Road on Friday night when the suspect, later identified as Peter Prunty, got in the driver’s seat and moved the vehicle about 50 feet, police said.

Prunty then got in another vehicle and drove away, but a medic and firefighters got the license plate number of his vehicle. Officers later found Prunty and charged him with interfering with police.

SOURCE

Clarksville, IN. (WDRB)–Some local EMTs are out of a job after their contract with Clark County was terminated.  “I was scared that they would…I’ve heard rumors from EMS providers that have known the history of the company,” says Thomas Harris, EMT.

Harris says Wednesday morning the rumors came true when management at Rural Metro Ambulance handed him a termination letter.  He says, “Saying that as of tomorrow we will no longer have a job here because they had lost…they gave termination notice to the county saying that they did not want the contract anymore.”

According to the ambulance company, county officials were given a 60 day notice of termination on March 15th.

John Hultgren is division director of public affairs for Rural Metro Ambulance and says, “Because we didn’t have the level of communication present that we felt was necessary to offer a good service.”

The move will likely cost 30 EMTs, who work out of a Clark County garage, their jobs but a Hultgren says there may be other opportunities down the road.  “Our goal is to bring them all into one of our surrounding operations.”

Rural Metro Ambulance is a large company with 50 years of serving others but Clark County officials say that service was lacking.

“According to our health department the service that we were getting from Rural Metro was not satisfactory,” says Jack Coffman, President Clark County Board of Commissioners.

Coffman says there’s a wide range of issues. “Not filing reports timely, some issues of materials that were not carried on the ambulance that are required by our health department.”

Clark County already has a new contract with Yellow Ambulance to provide coverage for the area.

Meanwhile, Thomas Harris heard about the effort to relocate everyone, but doesn’t have much confidence it will happen.

Harris says, “With 30 people, you know with the number of spots that they mentioned that they had…there’s no way that all of us is going to have jobs.”

Rural Metro Ambulance will also continue to operate in Clark County servicing health care facilities.  But for now, it’s unclear how many jobs that will provide.

SOURCE

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama — Police are on the lookout today for an ambulance they said was stolen from the entrance to a hospital emergency room.

Authorities said a Haynes ambulance was taken from UAB hospital about 8 p.m. Saturday. It was parked on an emergency room ramp at the time.

An executive with the company said it wasn’t clear how or why someone took the vehicle, which was parked after taking a patient from Elmore County to the hospital.

“There were four ambulances parked in the ambulance bay, and ours was in the middle. Somebody just walked up and stole it,” said Kirk Barrett, chief operations officer for Haynes.

A police lookout asked motorists to call 911 if they saw a Haynes ambulance marked with the unit number 206. The vehicle has an Alabama license plate that begins with the number 29, which represents Elmore County.

Barrett said citizens could assist police in locating the ambulance.

“There are ambulances out there everywhere. They can’t stop them all,” he said.

SOURCE

PIKE COUNTY, Ky (WSAZ) — A paramedic is behind bars troopers say he was driving an ambulance while under the influence of alcohol.

Kentucky State Police tell WSAZ.com Jeffery Hignite was weaving in and out of traffic until he hit a guardrail on Kentucky Route 319. He wasn’t hurt.

He was charged for driving drunk and is currently being held at the Pike County Detention Center.

SOURCE

OAKLAND — Five boys, two as young as 14, have been arrested in the killing of a San Jose paramedic in the Oakland hills two weeks ago, and police said Tuesday the juveniles have admitted their involvement in the slaying.

Quinn Boyer, a Dublin resident, was stopped at Keller Avenue and Hansom Drive about noon April 2 when the teens pulled their car alongside his Honda Civic and someone shot him in the head at point-blank range, police said.

He never regained consciousness and was pronounced dead at a hospital April 4. Boyer had driven his father to a doctor’s appointment that morning and then dropped him off at his Oakland hills home, and was alone in the car when he was shot.

The motive remains unclear, but the teens were arrested Monday and Tuesday on suspicion of murder, robbery and carjacking, police said. The boys’ names have not been released because of their ages.

Two are 14, two are 15 and one is 16, police said. They are all friends, but are not believed to be gang members, police said.

“I’m deeply concerned about an unacceptable and disturbing trend where robberies and other crimes are being committed by young people 13 to 17,” said police Chief Howard Jordan. “Young people are finding it very simple to point a gun and shoot someone.”

Police said Boyer was a random target. After he was shot, he apparently hit the gas pedal, propelling his car over a median strip and into a ravine.

Following the shooting, people in the Keller Avenue area described a “suspicious vehicle” in the area on the day Boyer was shot, giving investigators an idea of the car they were seeking.

An abandoned car — police have declined to name the make and model — was found on the afternoon of April 3 near Horace Mann Elementary School in East Oakland, miles from where Boyer was shot. Police said Oakland school district police Officer Anthony Fergoso helped identify most of the teens through surveillance video taken from near where the car was left.

The case is headed to the Alameda County District Attorney and criminal charges could be filed as early as Wednesday. Police are also investigating if the juveniles, or some of them, are linked to other crimes.

Boyer, a newly married 34-year-old, was memorialized Tuesday at St. Theresa Catholic Church in Oakland after a service that drew hundreds of friends, relatives, firefighters, paramedics, police, and city leaders, including Oakland Mayor Jean Quan.

Boyer had worked as a paramedic for Santa Clara County since 2008, with a stellar reputation on the job. In the days after he was shot, a memorial adorned the front lawn of his employer, Rural/Metro Ambulance, to honor him.

The cities of Oakland, Sunnyvale and Milpitas proclaimed Tuesday as Quinn Boyer Day.

Boyer grew up in Oakland and graduated from Sonoma State, the Santa Rosa Fire Academy and Foothill College’s paramedic program. He had recently been accepted into the physician’s assistant program at Stanford. He was also a Big Brother and a volunteer at the Order of Malta clinic in Oakland, his family said.

His family has declined to speak publicly about the killing, and were not available to comment on the arrests.

SOURCE

STRATFORD, CT – Mayor John A. Harkins has appointed Michael Loiz director of Stratford EMS. Loiz fills the vacancy created by the recent departure of Phil Onofrio.

When Loiz’s predecessor Onofrio was hired, Stratford EMS Administrator Donna Best sued the town because, she asserted, she had been fulfilling the duties of director and the town was allowed to hire only one director per department.

On Dec. 10, 2012, Judge Trial Referee Howard T. Owens Jr., at State Superior Court in Bridgeport, ruled that the hiring of Onofrio violated Stratford’s charter because the charter provides for a single director of each department, and Best’s role had previously been recognized as director of EMS.

When Onofrio arrived, Best was ordered to leave her office and vacate leadership responsibilities.

“The defendant Onofrio is not … director of the Stratford EMS,” Owens wrote in his ruling.

Owens ruled that hiring Onofrio “effectively removed” Best from her position in March 2011, despite having no legal claim to the office, even though Best maintained her employment.

Owens focused on the use of the singular “a” in the charter.

Town officials immediately announced they would challenge the ruling, and the department structure would remain as it has been since Onofrio’s hiring pending appeal. Best has remained on the job.

The town had argued that Harkins, or any mayor, has the right to appoint a director for each public safety department.

Onofrio resigned in February.

Regarding the new hire, a release from the Harkins’s office makes no mention of the previous controversry and says that Loiz has an extensive background in managing emergency services, and is a nationally-certified medical dispatch instructor. Harkins said Loiz is poised to build on all of the positive changes made at Stratford EMS during the last two years.

“Stratford EMS has been turned into a high-level emergency response service for the residents of Stratford. The organization has seen tremendous growth in volunteer participation and in the number of calls responded to by SEMS,” said Harkins. “Mike Loiz is the right person to continue building on the positive momentum generated over the last several months.”

Loiz is currently attending the Instructor Recertification Workshop (IRW) in Utah to recertify his Emergency Medical Dispatch Instructor credentials. This will be important to his oversight of the Stratford 911 dispatch center and integral in pursuing an international accreditation for the center.

Loiz comes to Stratford after working as the Director of Operations at Hunter Ambulance Service in Meriden, CT. In that role, Loiz was responsible for oversight of daily operations, managing a fleet of 80 vehicles and overseeing a $15 million budget.

SOURCE