Carroll County leaders and emergency officials are taking a closer look at how long it takes ambulances to reach people in need, after a woman reportedly waited 48 minutes for an ambulance on Oct. 2, WBBJ 7 Eyewitness News reported.
The issue was the focus of a recent county oversight committee meeting that brought together representatives from the Carroll County Fire Department, Priority Ambulance and Baptist Memorial Hospital. The goal, officials said, was to find the bottlenecks in the system, from the first 911 dispatch all the way to the moment a patient is handed off or transferred from the hospital, and to talk through fixes.
“It’s to provide the best emergency response system from fire to EMS for every citizen in Carroll County,” Carroll County Fire Chief Jonathan Gaskins said.
Some changes are already in place. Gaskins said an additional EMS unit has been brought in to help with call volume and to handle patient transfers out of the hospital. That keeps the primary ambulances free to answer new 911 calls instead of being tied up moving patients between facilities.
Leaders said a lot of long-term work remains. Carroll County currently runs just four scheduled ambulances each day to cover a mostly rural area of roughly 500 to 600 square miles, which means a single crew can be responsible for a large stretch of territory at any given time.
Officials have not announced a timeline for any further changes, but said the discussions between the fire department, the ambulance provider and the hospital will continue as they work to bring response times down across the county.
Sources: WBBJ 7 Eyewitness News, Carroll County Fire Department