Why Regionalization of Ambulance Services Best Serves You and Our Local Communities
January 2005
Richard Batt, President of Franklin Memorial Hospital
Franklin Memorial Hospital will combine the present five ambulance services we operate into a new regional EMS program to be called NorthStar. The merger of LifeStar, AMPS, Sugarloaf, Rangeley and CES will take effect July 1, 2005. Dramatic decreases in Medicare payments for rural ambulance services and big increases in the clinical complexity of EMS services make this change necessary. If we fail to act, most of the five local services will soon falter and eventually fail. By creating NorthStar we can serve this entire region with a high quality, paramedic EMS service at a cost that can be sustained long-term.
Our plan will protect quality, achieve cost savings, improve community service, moderate town funding requirements, keep modern ambulances and equipment in place, and protect employment for the great FMH EMS staff now serving this region. We have presented new contracts to all towns to start July 1, 2005 at a fixed price equal to what towns paid in their fiscal year starting July 1, 2003. Towns will not have any financial risk beyond the contracted amount.
The hospital board will create a 15 person NorthStar Advisory Board to allow broad community input. This group will monitor quality, service and recommend EMS policies directly to the hospital board.
Our regional plan is not complete, nor without flaws. We preferred an overhaul of the present funding formula for all towns. However, we could not find any formula that would produce a result that most towns would consider fair and acceptable. Fairness of funding is always from the perspective of each person and each town. New formulas that might theoretically be more fair would distribute the public funding in ways that would depart significantly from past patterns and therefore create opposition from those towns that would be unwilling or unable to pay dramatically higher EMS support payments. Therefore, we finally decided to generally stay with the present public funding pattern and gradually improve the equity of the funding formula in the future. We are open to all suggestions for other approaches, but to work, another approach must be capable of winning political acceptance by most towns in the region. No other politically viable alternative has yet surfaced.
NorthStar will build on the heritage of CES, AMPS, LifeStar, Sugarloaf and Rangeley. In the five programs we operate we have increased staffing, increased employee clinical training, increased staff services responded in unison, demonstrating the great power of teamwork and a regional system for EMS. As our ambulances and staff from AMPS, Sugarloaf, and Farmington responded, backup from our other bases moved to cover local needs and assist. Our EMS response was better than exceptional. If the community had been able to see what really happened on December 23, everyone would be so proud of what our EMS staff did that day.
We have worked hard to win and retain public trust. We hope towns will support our new plan so that we can advance what is now a very good EMS service to a program that is truly outstanding and that be operated at a more moderate cost capable of being financially sustained. We hope citizens will become informed about our plan and support it as a good move toward protecting the health of our communities and our region.
We will work closely with citizens, staff, and towns as we put this new regional program together as we all want a quality service that we can continue to be proud of.
For a look at our complete Ambulance Plan, visit our website at www.fchn.org/NorthStar
