Henrico Fire to begin staffing Tuckahoe Volunteer Rescue Squad station

The Henrico Division of Fire will begin staffing Tuckahoe Volunteer Rescue Squad’s Pump Road rescue station with trained personnel to service the West End community and take low-acuity calls, fire officials told the Henrico Board of Supervisors Oct. 10.

Fire Chief Jackson Baynard, Assistant Chief Jim Courtney and Assistant Chief Michael Roth presented plans for improving the division’s Emergency Medical Services efforts during the board’s work session. Through tracking the type and numbers of 911 dispatch calls made throughout the past few years, the Henrico Fire officials deemed it necessary to have a fourth unit to respond to calls that require less medical attention.

“We've seen that about 70% of the time, we dispatch calls as an [advanced life support] call,” Courtney said. “But after we get on the scene, and we evaluate the patient, it's actually a [basic life support] call. So the bulk of what we're doing is BLS.”

The fire department pitched the idea of staffing one of TVRS’s ambulances and its facility with medical transport technicians who work for the fire department during peak hours, 7 a.m. to about 6 p.m., Courtney said.

“This would help us from a fleet perspective, because we wouldn’t have to produce another fire department ambulance,” Courtney said.

Fire officials plan to put MTT staff into the Pump Road station beginning on Oct. 12 and intend to keep this agreement for a year and reevaluate after that. TVRS officials hope to see improvement in recruitment numbers after a year of regular advertisement for Tuckahoe by having the ambulance on the road seven days a week, Courtney said.

The Tuckahoe Rescue Squad station has two ambulances, one of which will be dedicated to the Henrico fire department’s MTT staff while the other will be for the rescue squad’s use. But, the other ambulance is available for Tuckahoe to use if officials so choose, Courtney said.

Three Chopt District Supervisor Tommy Branin raised concerns about insurance and liability for fire employees driving Tuckahoe’s ambulance.

But Baynard reassured the board that the firefighters would be insured because of the county employee insurance plan.

“We have taken all of the equipment off their ambulance and given that to them and stocked the unit with fire department equipment,” Courtney said. “It’s all the same electronics, just like we have in every other ambulance in the county.”

Baynard reiterated that this program will free up emergency technicians who are ALS-trained to respond to calls where their expertise is needed.

“This is just one more way to make sure our system is more effective,” Courtney said.

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The second improvement officials presented addressed plans to send the right transport units to the right call.

“Our recommendation is for some BLS transport units to send the right resource to the right call type,” Courtney said.

Right now, ALS is dispatched to every call, even if those services aren’t needed.

“And all of these calls as well that come in as ALS and end up being BLS, they take the majority of the workload. This can lead to burnout which can lead to people dropping their ALS because it's voluntary,” Roth said.

Previously, all calls were vetted to determine the priority of care, which led to ALS dispatchers answering calls for which their care expertise was not needed.

“​​We were really looking for a way to balance the workload of this EMS more equitably,”

Roth said. “This leads to increased reliability of ALS being available in the community.”

To help BLS responders feel more comfortable taking on an active role, officials are putting new training in place to increase BLS skill sets, Roth said. Along with the training, because the majority of calls are BLS, six of the ALS ambulances will become BLS ambulances and more people will be at each station to rotate through to prevent burnout.

“​​If an ALS call came in, and the nearest transport unit was one of these BLS ambulances, they would go and then there would be an ALS supplement that went with them for that assessment,” Rolf said. “And most of the time, that assessment will then turn into a BLS transport, which would keep ALS transport units in service.”Roth said this would lead to less frequent transfers of firefighters to different houses. That will help keep the community tighter and allow for better connections among fire officials.

“Who you work with, you know who you train with, better than someone seven districts over,” Rolf said. “And this shortage of ALS resources, and the need to staff ALS ambulances has really led to an issue where we're constantly transferring people out to try to meet those needs, and it's disrupting crew integrity.”

This change would decrease 60 ALS shifts per month, balancing the workload, Roth said.

“When we built this system, we did it in a way that allows that BLS designation rather than people having to move,” Roth said. “If the staffing needs were as such that day that it made sense to switch staff, that’s built into the system as well which means we don’t have to move people.”