Apr. 17—MORGANTOWN — For the people who work as first responders across the Mountain State, it’s all about the numbers.
And not just the 911 number called after that bad wreck on the interstate — or when a loved one is slumped over the kitchen table.
“Right now, we need everybody we can get, ” Christopher Starkey, a paramedic and lieutenant with Lewis County Emergency Medical Services, said Tuesday night.
“They need to understand: If we lose one more program in this state that puts out medical providers, we’re in really bad shape, ” he said.
Starkey made the hour-long drive from Lewis County on Tuesday evening to attend a meeting of the Monongalia County Board of Education, which is currently responding to a medical-related circumstance of its own.
He was among the crowd—many of them first responders—that filled the meeting room and milled in the hallway of the board and school district’s central office in Sabraton.
Starkey wasn’t there on behalf of his employer, he said. He was there for his brothers and sisters who do what he does.
He’s the creator and administrator of his “WV Calvary EMS ” Facebook page, which advocates for those first responders out on calls every day.
Pulling the plug ?
Mon’s board is considering whether to eliminate the emergency medical services program at the Monongalia County Technical Education Center.
MTEC has long been lauded for its turning out of nurses, operating room technicians and the like.
Due to declining revenues, however, Mon Schools—while being relatively more prosperous than its Mountain State neighbors—is still operating with about $4 million less in its coffers than it normally has budgeted this time in the academic year.
That means, as Schools Superintendent Eddie Campbell Jr. said last week, making the hard decisions of what to cut out—and what to leave in.
One program the district might have to reluctantly let go, he said, is the EMS program at MTEC.
Students sign up, the superintendent said, but many drop out due to its academic rigor. The program takes in everything from biochemistry to human anatomy and neuroscience.
Rigor, though, is what first responders need to effectively render aid, Starkey said.
In nearly two decades as a full-time, licensed paramedic and emergency medical technician, he’s responded to the full multitude of calls, from cardiac arrests—”I’ll never forget that first one “—to toddlers spiking dangerous fevers in the middle of night, with their anxious parents looking on.
Keeping the (ambulance) lights on The trouble is, he said, there are way more calls than there are people willing to take the time to answer them.
Last year alone in West Virginia, some 1, 000 EMTs and 800 paramedics responded to nearly 2 million emergency calls requiring an ambulance, he said.
This is in a state, he said, which has seen at least 26 independent ambulance services fade away in recent years, due to lack of money and people.
“Most of the EMS agencies out there aren’t funded by the state, ” he said. “They’re not funded by the municipalities, they’re not funded by the counties.
“A lot of them survive on what they bill from calls. And if you don’t have the people to run the calls, you don’t stay open.”
A full recovery MTEC, meanwhile, has a proven record of producing such professionals, said Chelsea Hayes, who directs its EMS program.
“Our kids absolutely have jobs when they graduate, ” said Hayes, herself a paramedic.
And, she said, they’re already saving lives.
One 17-year-old student of the program who works part-time at a local restaurant, recently performed CPR on a patron who had suffered a medical emergency, Hayes told the school board.
That patient left the hospital, fully recovered, three days later, she said.
Hayes urged the board to consider that, while mulling its decision.
She urged board members to consider what will happen when they call 911 — today, next week or next month.
“EMTs and paramedics are the only clinicians trained to make life-of-death decisions with no labs, no imaging, no backup—just a gut, a brain and a flashlight, ” she said.
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