Former emergency director asks Harrison County to pause changes to ambulance services

Hurricanes have taught Coastal Mississippians one thing: stick together.

When the wind subsides and the water recedes, we are at our best. We crank the chainsaws, share our freezer space, and make meals and beds for the displaced. The harder the punch, the stronger we get back up. Together. Every single time.

That’s one of the biggest the lesson from disaster response. Thirteen years as the Harrison County Emergency Management Director engrained in me the power of a unified community – both as individuals and as government agencies.

That is why I am writing today to respectfully encourage the leadership of Harrison County – both county and city governments – to pause efforts to divide our ambulance response services. What may seem like an easy ‘’improvement’’ is in fact more likely to create an entirely new set of problems.

Currently, all ambulance dispatch is run through an advanced, locally controlled center, where operators know our communities, our streets and available resources. Secondly, a single medical control – a physician – provides standardized medical guidance to paramedics in the field. It is hard to overstate the importance of that single command during an emergency response. It’s even more critical during the kind of natural disasters we seem to deal with almost every year.

Moreover, having multiple communities with individual contracts for ambulance service isn’t likely to increase the numbers of ambulances.

There are a finite number of paramedics and EMTs, both here and around the country. The availability of EMTs – not the response time metrics in another contract – will ultimately drive how quickly ambulances arrive on scene. Whoever is running Harrison County’s ambulance system is going to be hiring every available paramedic, and they likely still won’t have enough until this imbalance levels out.

The at-times frustrating wait for ambulances to respond here is being felt in nearly every community in country – the latest symptom of a widespread shortage of health care workers.

Finally, it’s easy to blame the incumbent. When someone waits for an ambulance, it’s the first responders who are already out there working the long hours, balancing resources and fighting to get through the day who unfairly bear the brunt of the complaints, legitimate or not. But for every complaint, I can tell you dozens if not hundreds of times the men and women already serving Harrison County have saved lives, risked their own lives and gone well above and beyond the call of duty to keep us safe. All of these men and women are our neighbors.

I’m not writing today to tell any government agency which ambulance service to use. Rather, I hope that we can take this discussion and pivot to one that focuses on listening to community concerns, improving health outcomes and focuses on innovation.

There are solutions, some easier than others: We can expand the health care workforce; creatively use telemedicine to treat patients at home, leverage our dedicated fire and police departments as stop gaps in emergencies and build a triage response system that focuses on severity and results rather than a simple ambulance race to every front door every time someone calls 911.

I hope Harrison County Board of Supervisors hears the concerns of Biloxi, Gulfport and other communities. But, just as importantly, I hope Biloxi, Gulfport and other communities understand the real solutions in our EMS system are more likely to be resolved by working together, regardless of what name is on the side of the ambulance.

Rupert H. Lacy served for 13 years as Harrison County’s Emergency Management director