Changes ahead for ambulance service

Mayor pledges to cover KHS basketball; monitoring ‘no medic’ calls

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The words “No Medic Available” have caused no small amount of consternation in the community, and for some time citizens of Kokomo have wondered openly about whether ambulance service in the city was sufficient to cover the need.

In response, the Kokomo Lantern called for a “Public Safety Summit” this summer, and more than two dozen medical professionals and public safety administrators gathered to address the issue. The conclusion reached might surprise some. It turned out that only a very few emergency calls for service were met with that “No Medic Available” response, and even those were covered within moments.

That doesn’t mean nothing will be done to change how services are delivered. Part of the impetus for calling the summit sprang from an incident at Kokomo High School’s Memorial Gymnasium during the sectional basketball game against Marion last spring. The incident revealed that emergency medical providers were not stationed at the game, like they are at Kokomo’s football games.

To remedy that, the City of Kokomo’s ambulances, mothballed since 2008, will be pressed back into service, according to Mayor Tyler Moore.

“We’re not as far as I thought we would be, but I am confident, in light of what we could provide at no cost to the school, we will be able to man an ambulance during those games,” said Moore. “We need to provide that service, and we are connecting with the school to see what that arrangement looks like.”

Beyond that, Moore is considering the deployment of firefighters at large public events, such as the Haynes-Apperson Festival, and already has authorized coverage at events this year. While they aren’t on an ambulance, they are trained to address medical emergencies.

“During the last handful of concerts, we've allowed a couple of the firefighters that are on duty to wander down into Foster Park to be there if needed,” said Moore. “Being close by and having a radio on so they can scoot back up the hill and get on a truck and go, we’re already providing a small amount of additional support at those events.”

Moore said that he would consider a policy or ordinance that would require larger events to have medical services on hand. In those cases, the city could provide an ambulance at the event’s expense.

“That would definitely be something I think you could work in,” said Moore. “I would hate to charge too much, but I guess it would depend on the scope and size of the events. Something as large as the Haynes-Apperson may warrant it, just with the number of people and the number of days. That's definitely something to look into and consider, especially if it can offset what we'd be paying the firefighters for coverage.”

The City of Kokomo isn’t the only entity considering changes. According to Parveen Chand, President of Ascension St. Vincent’s North Region, explained that the hospital soon will have additional ambulances in service in the Kokomo area.

“By October, at the earliest, we're going to have ambulance numbers 910 and 911 up and running,” said Chand. “We connected with (Kokomo Fire) Chief Chris Fraser, and we're going to see what else we can do collaboratively.”

Communication was the most significant result from the summit, according to Chand.

“If you hadn't put (the summit) together, we likely wouldn't be doing a follow up,” said Chand. “And we wouldn't really be having that honest dialogue, which I think is what the public's really looking for.”

Some will surely question why full resumption of the city’s ambulance service wasn’t the outcome of the meetings. It came down to the statistics. Howard County’s dispatch center provided the numbers emergency calls, along with the number of times “No Medic Available” was the result of an initial dispatch.

In June, more than 1,400 emergency calls for service were received. Of those, five had no medic available at the time of dispatch. However, a medic did become available within moments in each case. This held true across the entire first half of 2023. There were 35 such calls in the first six months of the year, and all received medics almost immediately after the initial call.

At a successful response rate of more than 99 percent, the group chose unanimously not to call for mobilizing the city’s ambulance service.

The Kokomo Lantern volunteered to monitor the “No Medic Available” calls going forward, investigating them to determine whether a genuine risk to public safety exists. On Sept. 5, two such calls occurred very close to one another.

At 3:20 p.m. on that date, an ambulance was requested for a residence on East Taylor Street. A dispatch request went out three minutes after the call was received, but no medic was available. However, a medic became available and was en route 51 seconds after the initial “No Medic” call.

At 3:44 p.m., a second “No Medic” call hit the air. This time, a medical emergency took place at the Howard County Courthouse. A dispatch request went out two minutes and four seconds after the call was received. A medic responded and was en route 24 seconds after the initial “No Medic” call.

While the coverage gap was exceedingly small, it is important to know why it existed at all. According to Howard County’s dispatch log, they were the ninth and tenth calls for service made within 45 minutes. The community’s emergency medical services covered eight calls in that span with no gap.

And the calls are being answered quickly. The average response time for medical services, from dispatch to arrival, county-wide, is just seven minutes in 2023. That number drops to less than five minutes when only calls within the Kokomo city limits are considered.

“For years, we had 47 ambulances -- a team of 410-420 people -- in the entire metropolitan area (Kokomo, Anderson, Fishers, and Carmel),” said Chand. “It was just tough staffing that many ambulances, and we felt like we could never get to a response time like what we're talking about today.

“We got it down to about four and a half minutes, five minutes, but we ended up geographically placing 47 ambulances across the entire area, strategically, just to get to that response. To have a seven-minute response here, that’s not bad.”