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Highlands Today

EMS Expands Coverage Countywide

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By Jim  Konkoly | Highlands Today

Published: November 13, 2007

LAKE PLACID — At 8 a.m. last Thursday, paramedic John Dyess and EMT Todd Kreulen parked a Highlands County EMS ambulance at the Tomoka Heights station, unlocked the door and staffed this station for the first time since mid-April.

That put county EMS back to its full daily staffing level of eight ambulances, including two in the Lake Placid area.

About four hours later, Dyess and Kreulen responded to their first 911 call from the Tomoka station, a former model home just north of Florida Hospital on U.S. 27 South. They reached a patient in respiratory distress in less than five minutes, well within EMS's goal of a six-minute average response time.

Steve Coltharp, acting EMS director, said reopening the Tomoka station improves response times not only in the Lake Placid area but also throughout the county.

The county's recent hiring of two paramedics and three EMTs solved a manpower shortage that forced EMS to reduce its ambulance crews from eight to seven.

For the past six months, EMS had only one station in the southern end of the county, in downtown Lake Placid. When that ambulance crew answered a call, Coltharp said, EMS had to immediately send one of the two ambulances from its main station, on George Boulevard just south of Sebring, down to Lake Placid as backup in case another emergency call came in.

"When A-1 (downtown Lake Placid) was out on a run, then the closest available ambulance was here (George Boulevard), which is 10 miles away from Lake Placid, and that's too far," Coltharp said.

"To compensate," he said, "we had to send a unit down to cover."

That situation then left one less ambulance in the Sebring area, and multiple calls there resulted in one of the two ambulances at the downtown Avon Park EMS station moving south.

"You'll sometimes see an ambulance at the (National Guard) Armory, and when you do that's one of the Avon Park units moving down to cover south Avon Park and north Sebring," Coltharp said.

"Getting A-8 (Tomoka station) back up really takes up some slack in coverage to maintain good response times," Coltharp said. "This is a real plus for the department."

Fortunately, he added, the Tomoka EMS station was closed during the summer months, when emergency calls drop down, and reopened in time for the winter season, when the county's population swells.

In the near future, Coltharp will make two more moves aimed at improving EMS response times by opening what he calls "day stations."

Instead of eight ambulance crews working out of six stations all the time, the eight ambulances will be stationed at eight sites between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m.

One of the two ambulances at the main station on George Boulevard will be assigned to a "day station" at the West Sebring Volunteer Fire Department on Hammock Road. And one of the two ambulance crews at Avon Park will go to another "day station" at the Highlands Lakes Volunteer Fire Department north of Avon Park.

The two ambulance crews can't be stationed at the volunteer fire stations around the clock, because the fire departments don't have accommodations for paramedics and EMTs to stay over night.

"At least for 12 hours a day, we'll have a faster response time to certain areas," Coltharp said. "This is a way we can maximimize our resources."

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