OKC Renews EMSA

[Doodlebug]

On Tuesday morning, the Oklahoma City Council voted overwhelmingly to renew EMSA. None of the councilors had anything but praise for the quality of service that EMSA and its fine team of medics provide. The two councilors who voted against EMSA did not understand what the other councilors and public knows: that EMSA provides the best value for the cities it serves.

Let's hope that the City of Tulsa will follow OKC's lead and vote for EMSA. The questions that councilors posed in OKC are the same questions Tulsa's leaders have been asking – Is EMSA providing the highest quality of care? Is EMSA the most cost efficient solution? Oklahoma City answered YES to both questions.

Today's decision had to be tough for the OKC councilors. The OKC Fire Department is a wonderful organization and does a great job of fighting fires (which is very different than providing medical ambulance care). However, this wasn't by any means a vote against firefighters. Rather, the Councilors understand that there are very serious risks – problems with billing and collecting, liability issues, union issues, etc. – involved in putting ambulance service under a city department. And since the quality of care and value EMSA provides are excellent, it made no sense for the city to take on that risk. Nor does it make sense for Tulsa to do so.

[sgrizzle]

Why, if emergency medicine is provided by emsa, do we dispatch Fire Department EMT's in parallel to EMSA? Why not just beef up one or the other?

[protulsa]

It is certainly not broken, so why fix it?

The 1 million or so subsidy the city is providing seems like chicken feed compared to what their liability coulld be if the fire departments' financial analysis is too rosy.

[Mike G]

quote:Originally posted by sgrizzle

Why, if emergency medicine is provided by emsa, do we dispatch Fire Department EMT's in parallel to EMSA? Why not just beef up one or the other?

Fire is dispatched as first response and for extra hands.  As a co-worker of mine, who is a police officer, said... and this is just a quote from him, not necessarily how I feel...

"Fire thinks since they run on a lot of medical calls that they can run the ambulance.  Well PD runs on a lot of medical calls and a lot of fire calls, so why don't we put a first aid kit and a fire extinguisher in the truck of every police car and you can get rid of fire and EMSA and save the city a lot of money"