By: Lydia Crawley
Parsons Advocate
Dr. PS Martin at the meeting of the Tucker County Ambulance Authority informed the board of his appointment to the state. “Something I need to tell you, if you haven’t been told,” Martin said, “as of this Friday, I will be the new State EMS Medical Director. As I told my co-workers, it’s my dumpster fire now.”
Martin informed the board of how the new position would impact his current position as EMS Medical Director for Tucker County. “The one thing I want this group to know,” Martin said, “is that when I first started talking to them, I had a list of requests. They met all of them. The one that they had of me was that I had to give up medical directorship of all of my agencies. I had a problem with that because there aren’t enough EMS physicians for me to give up all of my agencies that I am involved with. So, I explained to them first of all, that Tucker…does not have competition. There is no one beating down the door to take over EMS there. So, I don’t see that I have a conflict of interest…In Marion County where I am the Medical Director, they do have competition with Mon County, but I am also the assistant medical director of Mon County, but the competition that Marion County has with Harrison and Mon is not cut-throat. They work together. They help cover each other’s communities. They have never had that type of, so I don’t consider it a conflict of interest there either.”
“The last I heard from them, they were going to send me a form to fill a list of all of my EMS contacts and they would decide what was a conflict or not,” Martin said. “I have not heard a word back from them in a little over a month. So, I am not going to say anything else and I just wanted you guys to know that as far as I’m concerned, we continue along this line. If they do consider that there’s a conflict of interest, I have already looked out with my partners and I have four other EMS physicians in our group that one of their names would be put on all documentation. Everything on paper would be going through them, everything else would-be business as usual.”
Martin said that beginning in October, he would be spending some of his time in Charleston. “Starting in October…I will finish out my schedule as it is. I will still work Clinically at Children’s Hospital, WVU…I will just be reducing the amount of shifts. Once I get to October, every Tuesday and Wednesday will be my office hours in Charleston. I will go down on Tuesday morning, stay Tuesday night and come back Wednesday after hours. So that would give me a presence in Charleston. It won’t be every single week, but the majority of weeks, I will be there. Everything else I will do virtually or I will have leads across the state.”
The board congratulated Dr. Martin on his appointment.
Also at the meeting, Dr. Martin commended the work of an EMS staff member for their response to a cardiac arrest event. “I just wanted to recognize Cammy Nestor. The last time I did a major shift up here, it’s kind of interesting, we don’t generally have a whole lot of cardiac arrests. So, we had two cardiac arrests in one day…and the one would not have been proven and would not have been handled the way it was if Cammy had not had the forethought to do what she did,” Martin said. “She was first on scene. She had a patient who was obviously a drug overdose. She gave intranasal Narcan and then had the presence of mind to put them on the monitor and reassess the patient and she realized that the patient did not have a pulse and was not breathing. So, she started chest compressions as I came through the door, the patient had just awakened and looked at me and said, ‘What’s up, guys.’ It was when we actually pulled out the monitor and ran it off, what actually happened was she gave the Narcan intranasally just as his heart rate was dropping down below 10. So, then he went to a flatline and he was not circulating. He could not absorb the Narcan. She started chest compressions, circulated, he absorbed the Narcan and woke up. She resuscitated that cardiac arrest before I even got on scene and all by herself. It was pretty amazing and if she hadn’t put him on that monitor, we never would have known that. That’s the proof, right there. Again, Cammy, great job.”
