MedStat and Pafford Emergency Services were both scheduled to appear before the Leflore County Board of Supervisors today to continue a discussion about emergency response times in Greenwood and Leflore County.
The county has long contracted with MedStat for ambulance service and has recently received a number of complaints about slow response times.
At last Monday’s meeting, supervisors received a report from MedStat in response to a request they had previously made, asking for a printout of when calls were received and when ambulances arrived at the scene.
The report they received did not include that information, District 2 Supervisor Robert Moore said, and supervisors still didn’t have the details they needed to adequately understand MedStat response times.
Moore said a constituent in his district complained about a 45-minute response to an emergency call, which prompted Moore to ask MedStat to appear before the board last month.
On Feb. 14, MedStat Director Dave Eldridge told supervisors his company had been swamped by an increase in the number of daily non-emergency transport calls that sometimes took their ambulances out of service to emergency calls.
“When everything moves out of Greenwood, we pull a truck out of Carrollton,” Eldridge said.
But Carroll County has been experiencing its own problems with MedStat response times.
Last week, Carroll County’s Board of Supervisors heard from Eldridge regarding a recent accident near Carrollton at U.S. 82 and Mississippi 35.
Eldridge told supervisors that upon receiving the first call, MedStat’s ambulance responded to the wrong location; a second ambulance got lost; and a third ambulance finally came from Greenwood and transported a badly injured patient to Jackson.
Carroll County Sheriff Clint Walker told the board that he had to send a deputy out to find the lost ambulance and tell it where to go.
District 1 Leflore Supervisor Sam Abraham said his concern stemmed initially from a complaint by a constituent that an ambulance never arrived after being called to a Greenwood address.
“I never remember a time when the ambulance never came,” Abraham said. “If there’s not a mass disaster out there tying everybody up, that’s unacceptable.”
Abraham said he had noticed problems with MedStat arising since the company was bought by American Medical Response, one of the nation’s largest emergency medical response companies, headquartered in Colorado.
AMR bought MedStat in 2014.
“It used to be a privately owned company, and when you had a problem, you just called the owner up in Winona,” he said.
Abraham and Moore said that regular reports of response times are not something the board normally sees.
“We didn’t have problems, so we weren’t in need of a report,” Abraham said. “But in the last six months, things have deteriorated somewhat.”
Pafford Emergency Services, a family-owned operation out of Louisiana that serves Clarksdale, Cleveland and Tunica, made a presentation to the county in late February, promising eight-minute response times within the city 90 percent of the time and 15 minutes in the county.
Pafford President and Chief Operating Officer Keith Carter told supervisors that his company runs a full 24-hour report every day to its managers and supervisors, and a monthly report that includes the number of calls received, response times, types of calls, times calls were received and times the ambulance arrived.
Pafford contracts for emergency transport services in Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Louisiana and has expanded Mississippi services in the last two years to Brandon, Pearl and Madison and Rankin counties. Most recently, Pafford signed a multiyear contract with Yazoo County.
“We’re going to hear from both of them, and if I can’t get assurance that the current carrier can provide better response, I’m going to have to look for another carrier,” Abraham said.
According to Abraham, estimated response times are part of the county’s contract with MedStat.
• Contact Kathryn Eastburn at 581-7235 or keastburn @gwcommonwealth.com.
