New Ride

NWTH to get new ambulances

By George Schwarz
The Amarillo Independent

The city of Amarillo is auditing the performance of Northwest Texas Healthcare SystemÕs ambulance service, Amarillo Medical Services, but the findings will only show that the fleet is aging.

Photo by George Schwarz NEW RIDE: Northwest Texas Hospital has ordered four new ambulances to update its aging fleet.

And, Northwest has already ordered four new units and will relegate some of the older units to routine transport duties.

"We have already ordered four new ambulances," Dr. Nathan Goldstein, the hospitalÕs chief medical officer, said. "We are converting two of our current trucks to routine transport trucks which will be staffed with EMTs, not paramedics, to do the routine transports that donÕt require critical care, emergency care."

The hospital now has 14 units and the plan is to get new vehicles over the next two years until there are 20 available.

The hospital is also looking for additional sites in the city from which to deploy the ambulances, he said.

Meanwhile, the city of Amarillo is in the process of finalizing an "operational review" of the systemÕs ambulance service, Dean Frigo, the cityÕs finance director, said.

The city is looking at whether AMS is keeping good maintenance records, and it is checking the equipment, checking whether everyone working is licensed, and reviewing response times, the mileage and age of the ambulances, Frigo said.

"The big finding is the age of the fleet," he said, "and I think theyÕre taking care of that."

The plans call for the report on the audit to be made Tuesday to a joint meeting of the City Commission and the Amarillo Hospital District Board, he said.

Frigo said the city, which has franchised AMS to provide emergency services through the main dispatch center in the city, had never done such a review before.

"And, youÕre thinking, maybe weÕd better go look," he said.

Frigo also said the city began looking at the information before Baptist St. AnthonyÕs Health System announced plans for upgrading its emergency services by hiring the Amarillo Emergency Physicians group away from Northwest and getting into the helicopter business.

"If youÕre going to grant the (Northwest-AMS) a franchise, you probably ought to do something like this," he said.

"We feel a little uncomfortable with it because itÕs out of our purview. We really have no expertise in this."

Frigo said the findings show everything is fine and said, "Mark Nickson really does run a fairly good shop."

Nickson heads AMS for Northwest.

"They did it a few years ago and they did it again this year," Goldstein said, adding the city has the right to audit the ambulance operation but expressing concern about the expertise of the review.

"The person that audited it is a financial person who knows very little about EMS," he said. "And most of the papers that she got to compare the things to were fire department and fire standards, which are absolutely, totally different."

Goldstein said he doesnÕt know what the review will find, but that he believed that the only significant information is that response times increased slightly last year over the year before. But those times still meet the standards.

Part of the problem has to do with dispatch, Goldstein said.

"We are working with the city with respect to really putting all the dispatch together Ñ police, fire and EMS, in one area Ñ so that they are all there together so that the sharing of information is instantaneous," he said.

"Right now when you call, you get 911 and 911 takes the message and 911 then calls the ambulance dispatch to give them the information. There can be a three- to five-minute time frame between the time 911 gets it and the ambulance gets it."

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Posted: April 24, 2008