Officials look at public safety, weigh recommendations of firm after failure to meet response times

About a year ago, Campbell County enlisted the aid of public safety consulting firm TriData in an effort to assess and revamp its public safety system.

Thursday night, public safety officials from across the county held their last meeting with TriData representatives and began the transition toward implementing the firm’s recommended changes.

The foremost topic of Thursday night’s meeting centered around Emergency Medical Services response times, an area which has faced criticism due to failure in meeting standard response times.

In spring of this year, it took crews 40 minutes to respond to an unresponsive person call and transport her to the hospital. Campbell EMS blamed the problem on a lack of available volunteers and the fact that paid EMS workers were on another call.

On Thursday, Patrick Simpson, of TriData, addressed that particular need as his first point of concern.

“EMS responses didn’t meet the norms,” he said, “and I don’t think I’m telling anybody here anything that they don’t already know.”

Simpson said since the study began in 2008, there has been improvement in that area.

In June 2009, Deputy Director of Campbell County EMS Jason Stroud asked for and was granted permission to hire six new emergency responders.

Prior to that, Stroud had said the county’s goal was to respond to EMS goals in 15 minutes 90 percent of the time. The county was only meeting that goal half the time, he said.

The county, including the town of Altavista, now runs four full-time EMS units staffed by paid personnel, and Campbell County Administrator David Laurrell said he hopes to add up to three more full-time units staffed by volunteers.

Simpson said Thursday that Campbell County’s problem is not unusual, especially in a system that relies so heavily on volunteers.

Simpson said fire responses in the county were meeting the norms.

“It’s an area that we need to hold focus on,” he said.

Simpson also addressed capital improvement and vehicle replacement funds, the lack of adequate personnel during the daytime and the issue of public safety administration, particularly the chain of command.

A number of those gathered debated points on specific implementation of the proposed improvements, particularly when it came to the chain of command.

Laurrell said he wasn’t discouraged about the disagreements between the personnel and the report’s recommendations.

“I think that the intent of the report … was to identify what the issues are,” he said.

“The disagreement came in terms of the recommendations on how to implement that.”

Of the 19 areas that the report identified as needing improvement, Laurrell said the five discussed Thursday were the most important but that no one disagreed that improvement was needed in the other areas.

“If we had disagreed on the 19 issues … that would have been a problem,” he said.

Simpson also wasn’t discouraged that the county wasn’t planning to follow TriData’s recommendations to the letter.

“It’s like we give you a cookbook,” he said to the workers gathered. “You need to put your own flavor on it.”

He added the study was meant to lay the groundwork for improving the system.

“You do have the mechanisms to work with. You can adapt it to your individual needs, but don’t lose

everything in the process,” he said.

“The bottom line is service to the citizen, and sometimes, it takes non-traditional ways to work that service.”