Watching the Ambulance Clock : Response time is crucial as Ventura returns to private service

The city of Ventura knew it was taking a risk last year when it went ahead and started providing municipal ambulance service to its residents even though the county had contracted with a private firm to do so.

A legal challenge to a similar setup in another county was headed for the California Supreme Court, and an unfavorable ruling could put Ventura’s service out of business.

Which is exactly what happened.

The court ruled against separate municipal service, county supervisors voted to stand by their contract, and last week city residents once again found their 911 calls being answered by private ambulances from American Medical Response, a subsidiary of Canada-based Laidlaw Medical Transportation Inc.

But the matter is far from resolved. Having stood by their private provider, the supervisors must now regain the public’s faith by strictly enforcing the contract’s response-time provisions. First step: synchronizing dispatch clocks to make meaningful monitoring possible.

In their vote, the supervisors also ordered the city and the company to work together on ways to keep service levels high. According to Mayor Jack Tingstrom and Deputy City Manager Steve Chase, those talks have produced a short-term plan to put the city’s paramedics aboard firetrucks to make sure the first unit to reach every emergency scene will be able to provide advanced life support.

“We don’t want a decline in service,” said Chase. “AMR has said they will come forward to work with the city to prevent a decline.”

There’s no doubt Ventura’s successful year in the ambulance business raised expectations for city residents--and, vicariously, for those in the rest of the county who, in many cases, have been receiving AMR service all along.

The public’s greatest concern is slower response time. Ventura’s paramedics had answered 911 calls three or four minutes faster than the 10 minutes required by AMR’s contract. At the supervisors’ meeting and in a letter on this page last Sunday, a paramedic who worked for several private firms and, later, for the Ventura Fire Department explained one of the reasons: Nonemergency transport services often take one or more of a private firm’s three Ventura-based ambulances out of emergency service for hours at a time.

And that’s where the supervisors can take a couple of steps to rebuild the confidence of all Ventura County residents in private ambulance service.

Since the supervisors felt they owed it to AMR to honor the contract by returning the city territory, it seems only fair that the county vigorously enforce the contract’s relatively generous response-time requirements. Any failure to get ambulances to emergency scenes in the required time should be viewed as grounds to review whether this company is sufficiently committed to the safety of its customers.

Said Tingstrom, “If city units can respond in the six-to-seven minute range, AMR can too.”

An odd subplot in all this is the difficulty of precisely calculating response times because dispatch clocks are not synchronized.

Since time is literally a life-or-death issue in this debate, the county should get those clocks synchronized right away and then watch them closely.