Emergency

Has Rockdale gone a day lately without the need of an ambulance? At The Reporter we hear them running up and down Cameron Avenue, sometimes multiple times a day.

And the helicopters. That’s become a scary sound for everyone.

If we can’t have a hospital in Milam County could we please have an emergency room at least? It is possible but there is a lot of red tape involved.

According to Judge Steve Young, an emergency room in Milam County is out of the question at the moment. No big hospital will open one here due to it not being profitable for them. And don’t think he hasn’t tried them all.

The only good thing we could find is a program from Texas A&M University’s Health Science Center called VolEMS. This program was made possible by a $10,000,000 grant from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas.

Because of the COVID virus, this program has taken longer to get off the ground than anticipated. But it sounds like a good idea to help with the situation we are in, with no hospitals and no emergency room in Milam County.

Think of the VolEMS program as an Uber for emergencies.

The following information comes from BCBS of Texas and A&M’s Project Manager Jennifer Ozmetin, who is already well known around Milam County.

In the program VolEMS, volunteers trained and equipped to perform basic life support will be dispatched through a special smartphone app to respond to their neighbors’ emergencies when the county’s three ambulances are unavailable or too far away. 911 dispatchers will contact these volunteers based on their proximity to the emergency location.

“The app contacts the closest five responders,” project manager Jennifer Ozmetin says. “If you’re the one who is closest, you’re the one who can make a difference. This whole idea is about neighbors helping neighbors.”

According to Shara McClure, BCBSTX divisional senior vice president of health care delivery, “As communities are impacted by hospital and provider closures, we applaud the Texas A&M research team and the volunteers, who are willing to step up and serve their neighbors in need of emergent care. The team is showing us that we have an opportunity to think differently about meeting the health care needs in rural communities by leveraging technology and utilizing creativity to redeploy and rethink existing resources to provide access to care in rural communities.”

Project leader Dr. Joy Alonzo says her team focused on Milam County because of its vastness and lack of emergency services for its 25,000 residents. The county’s two hospitals were shuttered in 2018.

Now, the county’s closest hospitals and specialists are in Temple, Round Rock, Waco and College Station. Round trip, it can take two-plus hours for an ambulance to transport a patient to any of these cities, leaving large portions of the population vulnerable in an emergency.

“The problem is distance,” Alonzo says. “What happens when all three of the county’s ambulances are unavailable? Living in a rural town should not be a health risk.”

Her team aims to recruit as many as 30 volunteers who will receive training in CPR, as well as in basic lifesaving developed by the American Red Cross and American College of Emergency Physicians. Those volunteers could improve emergency response times and the health outcomes of their neighbors with minimal financial investment, Alonzo says, which always has been the goal.

Is it ideal for Milam County? No, but it’s much better than exhausting our volunteer firefighters every day of the week. Let’s all pray that this program gets off the ground sooner rather than later. —KWC