Davis resident Alan Tomson shares data with the Tucker County Ambulance Authority Thursday in Thomas during a special meeting of the board. Tomson shows TCAA members ways to manipulate staffing in order to maximize efficiency in both the Parsons and Canaan EMS stations.
THOMAS – The Tucker County Ambulance Authority held a special meeting Thursday at the Mountain Top Senior Center in Thomas to discuss ambulance scheduling throughout the county, and to take public comments on the subject. TCAA President Kathy Kahler said the gathering was an extension of the board’s last meeting where data was presented about EMS calls.
“I compared the number of calls from Parsons/Parsons area to calls from Thomas, Davis and Canaan Valley,” Kahler said. “I also included the number of permanent residents as well as some visitor information. I think the proposal I made at the last meeting was to take the number of hours that we currently staff every month at EMS, and divide them up slightly differently so that it would reflect the number of calls in those two areas.”
Tucker County EMS Field Operations Manager Sheila Marsh said she brought data showing the days of the week and how many runs there were on each day.
“It shows the percentage of the runs are from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. and what percentage of the runs are from 12 a.m. to 8 a.m.,” Marsh said.
Marsh said she spent a long time looking over the data and could not make heads or tails of it.
“I could understand the data, but could not understand how to compare them to one another,” Kahler said. “I asked Al Tomson, a Davis Councilman, who worked with data through much of his career, to look at the data and give me an overview. When he did so, it was really wonderful and very clear. I asked Al to give the overview to you as well.”
Tomson said he retired from the Army after 36 years of service and said he was married to a member of the TCAA. “I started studying math and statistics at West Point, and I have a graduate degree in mathematics. I studied data in the Army to make operations better – whether that be to make something more profitable or more efficient – but it involves looking at data so it tells you the story.”
Tomson said it is better, sometimes, to analyze data because humans tend to get emotional about some topics.
“It is a very emotional topic when you look at how operations are run,” Tomson said. “The data said Tuesday is the day in Tucker County for the most ambulance calls. The most frequent time of day an ambulance is called is 1 to 2 p.m.”
“Whatever the reason, Tuesday afternoon from 1 to 2 p.m. is the most frequent time that an ambulance is needed,” Tomson said. “All I am going to talk about is the data. It is unbiased and it is unemotional. The numbers are the numbers.”
Tomson passed out copies of the data he took his information from. “The first chart shows calls from Parsons/Parsons area and Thomas, Davis and Canaan. There are a lot more ambulance requirements for Canaan in January and February because of skiers and in June, July and August because of hikers and bikers getting hurt.”
“So what it is saying is that about 60-62 percent of the ambulance calls today are in the Parsons/Parsons area and 37 percent are in the Thomas, Davis and Canaan area,” Tomson said. “The second slide shows the current staffing. The Parsons/Parsons Area facility is staffed 24/7. Looking at January and February this year, the Thomas, Davis and Canaan area is staffed about 8 to 12 hours, four days a week.”
Tomson said he put the data into a map and it showed that Parsons is getting 80 percent of the staffing hours and Thomas, Davis and Canaan is getting about 20 percent.
He showed how many ambulance runs were made each hour of each day over a period of three years. “I made a chart showing when the calls happen. I played with the hours – what if Parsons went to being staffed seven days a week with 18 hour shifts and at Canaan, they were staffed 12 hours a day, seven days a week.”
Tomson said that staffing pattern would move the proposed staffing to 60 percent in Parsons/Parsons area and 40 percent in Thomas, Davis and Canaan. “This is much more representative of the calls received. We take that and show what 18 hours looks like at Parsons/Parsons area. I picked 6 a.m. to midnight because that time has the highest percentage of calls that happen during that time of day. If I add those percentages, it comes out to 91 percent.”
Tomson said what has changed is there is less hours in the Parsons station, but instead of covering 100 percent, it has dropped to 91 percent. He said in Thomas, Davis and Canaan with staffing 12 hours a day, seven days a week. “What used to be 36 percent coverage raises to 71 percent.”
“That’s the change that the data says,” Tomson said. “If it’s up to the data, where you would schedule your time where it’s the most effective use of the time you have, would be the change I am talking about. Reducing some of the time in Parsons and adding them to Canaan is what the data shows we need to do.”
Tomson said the most important change is the level of service.
“Parsons drops from 100 percent to 90 percent and Thomas, Davis and Canaan goes from 36 percent to over 70 percent,” Tomson said. “That is important. I didn’t increase the total hours used, in fact, there are less hours in the proposed schedule than what is currently being used. I didn’t use more hours to be more effective, I used the data to tell the story.”
Tomson said the disparity right now in ambulance response times is significant. “In Parsons, if you call an ambulance, from dispatch to the ambulance showing up is 8 minutes. In the Parsons area, 80 percent of the time the ambulance will show up in 15 minutes. The issue is, if you are in Thomas, Davis or Canaan, 90 percent of the time, that ambulance will take as much as 46 minutes to show up.”
TCAA member Misti Shine said one presentation is not enough to show how the staffing should be. “This would need to be a living document that would need to be looked at again after time.”
Bobby Phillips, TCAA member, said folks needed to remember they provide service to the entire county. “We need a station on this mountain in a central location where it can handle Parsons, Dry Fork, St. George, Pifer Mountain and the entire Valley. We have to stop bickering between ourselves about what is the mountain and what is Parsons. Let’s work together to get the whole county covered. That is the objective of this meeting – to get the whole county covered.”
Kahler said she thought the group needed to look at the idea of having the staff take call to improve our coverage. “When you look at the graph you can see we have 90 percent coverage of our calls from 6 a.m. to midnight, but we could consider having staff on call from midnight to 6 p.m.”
Kahler said if the board was to adopt the schedule proposed by Tomson, it would cost the TCAA nothing more than it currently spends for wages.
Public comments were taken from Janice Shepherd who said she was impressed with the data.
“This is very well done,” Shepherd said. “In my own profession, we came to a point in education that we had to decide between emotional decision making and empirical data based decision making. That is a major cutoff. I think you are doing a good job looking at and using this data to make an empirical decision based on facts. Good for you.”
EMS employee Mike Canfield asked what brought the discussion up.
“What brought this up?” Canfield said loudly. “I have been on this mountain for 18 years. I joined Tucker County EMS in 2002. We did not have coverage up here on this mountain from 1991 through 2010 because I came on board with them, called in on every call and could not get an EMT 90 percent of the time out of the valley. So what brought this up? What’s the big issue of not having coverage up here? There are seven employees up here now that has another part time job. They leave us in the winter because they make more money and come back in summer. They was working two days a week up here, then they decided they wanted to go to one day a week to go to the ski area and make more money. So what bring this issue up? Over the 18 years I have been on this mountain, there was nothing discussed about this. Now all of a sudden, you guys wanting 24/7 coverage up here. So now what’s the difference between now and 18 years ago? That’s all I’ve got to say.”
Patrick Darlington, Tucker County Commissioner, said lots of things have changed in 18 years.
“Populations have changed, we have an influx of tourists and that is extremely important to the county,” Darlington said. “Also, within15 months, we are going to have a four-lane highway that dumps out here. We have to plan for the future of that. This is why we are discussing this now. The influx that Corridor H is going to bring in here is unimaginable. It’s going to bring traffic and more people, and we need to be prepared. We cannot be reactive, we need to be proactive to it now.”
A motion was made and approved unanimously that hours be split 60 percent in Parsons and 40 percent in Davis, Thomas and Canaan based on the data analysis. “How we arrive at that split and how the on call time works deserves to be a separate conversation,” said Mary Anne Tomson, TCAA Board Member.
