HEFLIN — It’s funny, the things you remember. It was about 20 years ago that the red-haired woman was lying just so on the Interstate 20 pavement. She was obviously dead. But the 10-month-old baby under her arm was still alive, Heflin Mayor Anna Berry remembers. Berry was driving east in a red Volvo when she pulled up to the scene that morning. A man with an Australian accent had told her not to walk up to the accident. The red-haired woman’s car was sideways in the left lane.
Apparently it had struck an 18-wheeler parked on the roadside. It killed the woman and a man, presumably her husband, Berry said, recalling the scene from her office in downtown Heflin.
She can still see the baby’s little eyes and the children crying on the bank. And she remembers wearing a red dress and wondering where the paramedics were. “There was nobody there but truck drivers,” Berry said. Cleburne County’s hospital had recently closed and there was no ambulance service in the county at the time. The kids were airlifted out to Birmingham, Berry said. She and several other county residents, including coroner Rudy Rooks and paramedic Keith Roberts, formed a nonprofit ambulance service soon after that accident.
Today that ambulance service’s level of operations is endangered. Pay is poor, yet payroll and insurance costs still eat into the 4-mill tax that supports the service. Bankruptcy is a possibility down the road for the hospital board that oversees the EMS, if no changes are implemented.
Yet 20 years ago, at the time of the highway tragedy, the community came together and donated land, time and materials to the project. Cleburne County soon had a viable emergency medical service.
After a while it got too big for the volunteers to run and was given to the county hospital board. “It’s the ultimate volunteer success story,”
Berry said. Success is fleeting After a year of losing money, the Cleburne County Hospital Board is strapped for cash and is looking at the possibility of cutting services — leaving the county’s 15,000 residents with a level of emergency medical service that it hasn’t seen since the time of that accident.
The hospital board receives a 4 mill tax — about $440,000, said Shannon Roberts, board chairman — and operates the county nursing home in addition to the EMS. The 82-bed nursing home is usually self-sufficient, whereas the EMS typically operates at a monthly loss.
The number of nursing home patients fell last year and the board had to put money into it to keep the facility running. Having to support both operations rather than just one stretched the hospital board’s finances.
Cuts and adjustments were made to both, with the nursing home changing therapy providers and EMS slashing its budget by 14 percent.Attempts earlier this week to reach nursing home director Eura Harrell were unsuccessful.The cuts and changes weren’t enough, however. If the hospital board continues operations as they are now, it will go bankrupt in two to three years, Roberts said.
Patients have returned to the nursing home and it showed a profit the last two months, Roberts said. He feels it has turned the corner and is no longer in trouble.
EMS, however, has long-term problems, Roberts said. Last year’s tight finances showed the hospital board that the EMS’s rising payroll and health insurance are unsustainable and must be cut. “Just gradually over time, the EMS has consumed more and more of the tax,” Roberts said.
“They get closer and closer to (using all of) that 4 mill tax … and actually the 4 mill tax will decrease next year about 10 percent because of lowering property values.”
Tenuous position(s)
Payroll has risen over the past three years because the Cleburne County EMS doesn’t pay a competitive wage, said Keith Roberts, now the EMS director.
He’s unrelated to Shannon Roberts, board chairman. It pays a little more than $10 an hour and doesn’t provide benefits. As a result, almost all of the 14 EMS employees are part-time and are working there as a second job, Keith Roberts said.
“My people are so underpaid … and they have the hardest job,” Keith said, noting they cover 575 rural miles with the closest hospital 22 miles away. “It takes a unique paramedic to do well out here.”
There are eight paramedics on staff, one of whom had a motorcycle accident in November and might not return to work, Keith said. Of the other seven — which includes Keith — only three count Cleburne County EMS as their primary employer.
One is in nursing school and will leave upon graduation.
Another is in law enforcement and can only work there because of the flexibility of his current assignment.
The longest tenured paramedic — 10 years, twice the average career length, Keith said — is primarily a firefighter in Calhoun County. Another is primarily a paramedic in Oxford.
Two declined to be identified in this story. But both could envision a scenario in which they leave the EMS in the near future.
Losing two paramedics would force the Cleburne County EMS to cut services.
There’s little hope the county could fill the position, Keith said. No paramedics have applied to the county in three years. “I’m hanging on by a little thread,” Keith said. Cutting services means Keith would run at least one basic life support ambulance. Basic life support ambulances do not have paramedics, only emergency medical technicians. EMTs are only able to stop bleeding and perform CPR.
Keith estimated about 62 of the roughly 250 calls the EMS receives each month require a paramedic.
Without a paramedic on those calls, about a third of those would result in the patient dying, Keith and a paramedic estimated.
That would equal about 20 deaths a month.
Troubled future
Turning a profit — or operating close to the margin — seems unrealistic for a rural ambulance service, said Carl Smith, treasurer of the Cleburne County Association of Volunteer Fire Departments.
Few, if any, EMS operations turn a monthly profit, he said. Smith feels the whole 4 mill tax should go to the EMS, but believes the hospital board should keep the nursing home while it’s profitable.
He can’t imagine an emergency service — fire, police or medical — running without government subsidy.
A 2 mill tax and 2 cent fireworks sales tax gets divvied up between 12 fire departments in the county, Smith said. The Ranburne Volunteer Fire
Department wouldn’t run without it, he said.
The Heflin Volunteer Fire Department wouldn’t be able to run as it does now without that tax benefit and additional subsidies either, said Terri Daulton, Heflin city clerk.
Taxes and government should work to keep people safe and healthy, said Daulton. The tax pays for equipment and training while the city pays utilities and salary, she said.
The objective is keeping the residents safe and healthy, Daulton said.
“We … make sure they have what they need,” she said. “Profit is not something we talk about.” The county’s need for an ambulance service is only increasing. In three years, new state laws will only allow volunteer firefighters who take 40 hours of class and a certain amount of training to perform medical treatment, Smith said.
At that point, the EMS is going to be the only service that can respond to a medical call, he said.
“It just scares the poo out of me where we may be headed,” Smith said. “I don’t think the people understand just how critical that service is until they need it.”
Star staff writer Jason Bacaj: 256-235-3546
Bacaj, J. (2011, April 29). Cleburne News - Local News, Business, Sports, Events, Blogs, Videos, Podcasts.
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