With the Guthrie County Board of Supervisors reviewing the Request for Proposal (RFP) that the Emergency Medical Services (EMS) Advisory Council submitted, there are some things that they are making sure services know they are looking for in the proposed system.

Guthrie County Health Services Director Jotham Arber says that one item on the list are that they wanted services to be able to provide Advanced Life Support (ALS) to all areas of the county, within a conducive time frame for the best care to be provided, which is about 20 minutes. He mentions that this wouldn’t be a hard and fast rule though, as they are asking for that to happen 85 percent of the time, because they realize that sometimes things like weather, other emergencies and traffic can slow down response times.

Arber tells Raccoon Valley Radio about the differences in care that ambulances can provide, based on their level of equipment and personnel.

“A lot of folks might not know that there are different levels of ambulances. There are ALS, which is Advanced Life Support, and on those you have the monitors, you have the oxygen, you have the medications, and you have all of the things that you would need for the most advanced level of things. And then there are BLS, which is Basic Life Support, and on those you don’t necessarily need to have the medications, because you wouldn’t necessarily need a paramedic on there. You could have an EMT (Emergency Medical Technician), and an EMT can only give certain things.”

Arber explains that the County would also be looking for services to maintain certain quality measures, which is something that they already do, and look at quality improvement where needed or available. He adds that they would also ask for services to coordinate.

“The goal is to have them all collaborate so that your Stuart, your Panora, your Adair, your first responders are all working together, so we wanted our services to figure out how they could make that happen.”

Arber says that high levels of coordination would allow services to know where they are needed to go, whether that be to a local hospital, or if they need to get a patient to Des Moines or Omaha, Nebraska for more specialized treatment. The last thing he shares is that training would need to be kept up to date, which is also something that services should already be maintaining.