By Jesse Sweigart, The Columbia Chronicle
A former head of Columbia’s volunteer ambulance service asked Borough Council on Tuesday to back out of a program that lets the borough’s ambulance provider hold lower-priority calls before responding.
Frank Splain Jr. of Maytown said he joined Columbia Ambulance and later ran Columbia Quick Response Service for about 16 years, after the town’s emergency room closed in 2003. He said he is in his 50th year as an EMS provider.
His concern is a Lancaster County policy that council agreed to after a presentation by Penn State Health Life Lion EMS, the borough’s ambulance provider. Under it, Class 3 calls, which dispatchers rate as non-emergencies, can be placed in “pending” status when the ambulance service is busy.
Reading from the county policy, Splain said that if no one responds within 15 minutes, the county 911 center redispatches the call to the home agency. If no ambulance has responded after 30 minutes total, the call goes to another service. He said Lancaster County is the only county in its seven-county EMS region with such a policy.
When a council member said there was only a single 15-minute window before another service is called, Splain read the policy aloud, which describes 30 minutes of total pending time. At least one council member responded that the second 15 minutes was “not what we were told” and was not in the documents Life Lion gave council.
He walked council through a hypothetical: an 88-year-old woman falls and tells the dispatcher her side hurts a little. If it turns out to be a hip fracture with internal bleeding, he asked, “How long do you think she can lay there on the floor?”
He said he has personally responded to more than 50 Class 3 calls in the borough that turned out to be serious. He recalled a 3 a.m. “sick person” call on Mill Street that turned out to be a cardiac arrest.
“Again, I’m not here to put Penn State Life Lion down,” he said. “I have lots and lots of friends and good providers that work there.” Every service gets busy, he said, but without the program, the next available ambulance would simply be sent.
He urged council members to request monthly reports from Life Lion and use their access to Lancaster County-Wide Communications records, which show dispatch times, arrival times and how long Class 3 calls sat pending. He asked council to rescind the program and “go back to normal dispatching.”
A council member thanked him and said council is not locked in. “We can opt out if we find that it’s not working for the borough residents,” they said, adding that council’s public safety members would reach out to him soon.
During council comments, a councilmen called it a pilot program that is new to the borough and said council would watch it closely. He asked residents who feel they are not getting the service they should to contact council’s public safety members.
