Along with its own vehicle fleet, the Mount Airy Rescue Squad is now housing one from another agency at its headquarters on Frederick Street — a simple gesture that will pay big dividends for area hospitals and patients.
This involves a partnership forged between the rescue squad and Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist AirCare in Winston-Salem.
Although the term “AirCare” is being used, the squad won’t be accommodating one of the helicopters for which the air ambulance program is best known, but aiding its ground-based Critical Care Transport Service instead.
For the first time ever, that program now has a full-time ambulance and crew stationed in Surry — available to transport area patients who require treatment at larger facilities including Wake Forest Baptist Health or hospitals in Durham or Charlotte.
This service not only will benefit hospitals in this county but others in Wilkes and Alleghany counties and also in Virginia.
Meanwhile, it will free up ambulances of the Surry Emergency Medical Service to respond to active emergency calls rather than being tied up with out-of-county transports from hospitals.
Based on comments at Tuesday’s gathering, this is resulting from county officials relinquishing a longtime franchise role that required such trips to be undertaken by the EMS, and allowing Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist AirCare to take on that task.
“This keeps our trucks in the county running 911 calls,” Surry Director of Emergency Services Eric Southern explained Tuesday.
Welcomed officially
A grand opening to celebrate the new partnership was held Tuesday at the squad headquarters, featuring a ribbon cutting, with about 25 representatives of both it and Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist AirCare attending along with other interested parties. The arrangement actually began on March 1.
“They were looking for a location,” squad Assistant Chief Corey Scearce said of AirCare officials’ desire to maintain its unit locally.
The squad had an open bay at its facility, so the partnership worked out all around, Scearce added.
While the sparkling new AirCare ambulance based at the Mount Airy Rescue Squad isn’t meant to be deployed for emergency calls, its presence in this strategic point in the region will reduce times needed to reach and transport hospital patients. That could result in lives being saved, officials say.
The new arrangement also is more economical, reducing trips that normally might be made from Winston-Salem to outlying areas and back — to which the unit housed in Mount Airy can more quickly respond.
“It’s made a huge impact in the region,” AirCare Assistant Program Manager Mack Tolbert said during Tuesday’s event.
In one recent two-week period, the vehicle logged 2,500 miles.
The ground-transport ambulance — a Ford F-450 model costing $280,000 — is equipped with four-wheel drive to better negotiate snowy mountain roads that could be encountered during its various runs to pick up patients in far-flung sections.
Steve Scott, a local businessman who has been a member of the squad’s governing board for 25 years and now serves as its president, praised the win-win situation represented by its agreement with Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist AirCare.
“This is wonderful,” Scott said Tuesday.
Source: https://www.mtairynews.com
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