The Lisbon-Mt. Vernon Ambulance Service has placed a new response vehicle in service!

The new 2023 Tahoe Special Services Vehicle is not for patient transport, however.

In 2020, LMVAS had the opportunity to try an ALS response program thanks to donation of a retired police vehicle from the City of Mount Vernon. This program was to evaluate if EMS could be provided in a more efficient manner with increased paramedic availability, as well as decrease response times. Because of the volunteer nature of the ambulance service, volunteers oftentimes respond from home to the station to then drive to the scene of the call when their pagers alert. This means that it can take approximately 10 minutes for the ambulance to arrive on scene for an in town call out, even more if the call is in our rural district.

With the ALS response program, on-call paramedics will be assigned to the SUV and able to take the vehicle home, meaning they can respond directly to the scene. Oftentimes this means time savings of five to seven minutes to have a responder at the patient’s side.

This provides several benefits such as in cases of cardiac arrest, where we know for every minute that passes without CPR, we can estimate a 10 percent decrease in survival. On car accidents, the first arriving EMS unit can determine what resources are needed and give an accident report to responding rescue and EMS units.

The other benefit of a two-vehicle response is increasing the availability and flexibility of our paramedic responders. Paramedics are becoming more and more difficult to find, especially in a volunteer capacity, which means LMVAS relies on the limited number of paramedics to obtain as close to 24/7 paramedic staffing as possible. This means we also need our Advanced EMTs, EMTs, and drivers to be thoroughly engaged and ready to operate at their full scope of practice when called upon.

While not every call out requires a paramedic, the paramedic is able to triage patients and make the determination if they are required to accompany the AEMT or EMT crew to the hospital. If they are not needed, the paramedic can be available for a second call out while allowing other EMS provider levels to use their full scope of practice to care for patients.

This purchase was possible thanks to strong community donor support and thoughtful financial planning by the Lisbon-Mt Vernon Ambulance Board of Directors.