Hiring the University of Florida to take over Sumter County’s ailing ambulance service is among the options County Administrator Bradley Arnold will present next week to commissioners at a workshop.
The workshop, which is open to the public, will be held at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Everglades Recreation Center.
The change is among 10 options Arnold will propose that also include continuing to use a private provider or county-operated emergency medical services. Commissioners cannot vote on the options at a workshop meeting.
Arnold also will present information on two options for the AED (Automatic External Defibrillator) program in more than 230 neighborhoods. Alerts to AED volunteers recently were shut down for at least three weeks due to a technical problem. The volunteers use AEDs to treat heart attack victims until help arrives.
Ambulance services currently are run by American Medical Response (AMR), a large national company, and a private contractor has provided them for a decade.
Some people have reported long ambulance response times of up to an hour or more over the past several months.
On April 20, an ambulance took 38 minutes to respond to a 73-year-old Oakland Hills woman who had fallen. She is the mother of former Villages fire chief Michael Tucker.
“I will admit I am significantly bothered by the fact that this injured woman, laying on the floor suffering, was my mother,” Tucker wrote in a letter published this week by Villages-News.com. “But the reality is that nobody should have to wait 38 minutes for an emergency responder to be by their side and make a ‘real-time’ assessment of the patient’s condition.”
AMR’s contract with the county, which expires next year, requires that ambulances arrive within 10 minutes for at least 90 percent of 911 calls in the urbanized area. Firefighters often arrive within five minutes of a call and provide medical assistance until the ambulance arrives. Most firefighters are trained emergency medical technicians or paramedics.
Seven of Arnold’s options involve retaining a private ambulance contractor, one involves an academic partner (the University of Florida), one would consolidate emergency medical services with the fire departments and another would operate ambulances through a separate county department. A few of the options propose merging the separate Villages and Sumter County fire departments.
You can see Arnold’s upcoming presentation at this link: Bradley Arnold’s presentation
According to Arnold’s outline, handing off ambulance services to the University of Florida could reduce ambulance crew delays at hospitals because UF-Health now operates both The Villages and Leesburg hospitals.
The law requires ambulance attendants to transfer patients to a medical professional of equal status at the hospital. That means a patient treated by a paramedic on the ambulance must be transferred at least to a registered nurse. Ambulance crews sometimes must wait with patients for the appropriate person to arrive, which is a cause of delayed response times.
The university plan also would customize responses based on the type of call, featuring roaming community-based response units in addition to ambulances. Crew members would get involved with the community by teaching CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) and AED (automatic external defibrillator) classes.
The plan also would eliminate firefighter responses for about 65 percent of calls deemed lower priority while retaining their responses for cardiac arrest, respiratory distress, hemorrhage, lift assists, extrication, special operations and hazardous materials.
AMR and other ambulance providers were hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused staff shortages and slow response times in some communities.
Last month, San Diego replaced AMR with another private contractor. In Rochester, N.Y., residents have faced the same slow response issues with AMR as Sumter County and the AMR operations head there attributed the problem to inadequate staffing.
