Midway Fire partners with ambulance service
BY PAM BRANNON Gulf Breeze News news@gulfbreezenews.com

Midway Fire District's ambulance options just keep growing. A national ambulance service, American Medical Response (AMR), wants to partner with Midway FD in a bid to the county to provide ambulance service countywide. Santa Rosa County asked that bids from anyone interested in providing the service to submit a request for proposal to the county commission by April 3.

AMR presented a proposal at the Feb. 13 Midway Fire District meeting showing how a partnership would work, and the advantages it would offer the residents and staff of Midway Fire District.

Chief Stephen Demeter also presented the study done by the Midway Fire staff over the last month on the feasibility of Midway bidding on the entire countywide contract to provide ambulance services for Santa Rosa County.

Midway Fire Commissioners set a special public workshop meeting to be held Thursday, Feb. 22 (tonight) to discuss both proposals, as well as any others that might come before them by the time of the workshop.

AMR's partnership proposal AMR representative Riley Sayne told fire commissioners that AMR is the largest ambulance service in the nation, transporting four million patients a year. He said they employ 18,000 nurses and Emergency Medical Technicians nationwide, and have 50 years experience in the business serving 36 states.

"EMS is our specialty," Sayne said. "We have the largest paramedic training program in the country, and those paramedics do not have to even work for us to complete our training. Within a matter of 90 minutes to two hours we can have an influx of 50 additional ambulances into an area if a natural disaster, like a hurricane, hits." AMR representatives said they would place two ambulances in the Midway Fire District; one at Holley-Navarre area, and four more ambulances throughout the county. AMR would pay MFD for every transport they did.

"It is zero transport risk for the district this way," Sayne said. "Every time you do a transport, you know you will definitely get X number of dollars." Sayne said they took last year's Midway Fire medical response runs - which were just over 1,000 - and figured with their formula what that would bring Midway Fire if being paid by AMR. "With 1,000 runs, you would receive $83,160 for the year. That is all profit, with no cost to Midway at all," Sayne said.

Fire Commissioners were not ready to do answer immediately, stating this was the first opportunity they had to even see the proposal, and they needed to take it home and read it and look at all the other proposals. Fire Commission Treasurer Clyde Broome asked, "Would it cause a conflict for you all at AMR if we entered the partnership bid with you guys, but also then submitted our own countywide bid and then also the bid we were going to submit from the beginning, for just our own slice of the county down here, separate from you guys?"

Sayne said, "That seems to me like you would just be bidding against yourself. If we submit a bid with a partnership with Midway, then that will be the only bid we make. One of the real benefits of a co-bid with us is Midway gets everything they want and need at no real cost to you. We have put all of our energies and planning into a partnership bid with Midway. We have not even considered putting together any other bid ourselves."

Midway Fire District's countywide bid feasibility

Demeter presented the results of the study done by the District's staff over the past month on the feasibility of Midway FD's bidding on a countywide ambulance service.

"County Commissioner John Broxson said it would be a real test to see if you could take the Midway model and make it work across the county. He said that would be the best solution, and we think we have shown here that can be done," said Demeter.

Demeter and Broome presented a five-year projection, based on ambulance transports from the county records for the past few years, on what monies Midway FD could put back in to the system. The first year is it proposed to put $75,000 back into the countywide system, and then each year after to put between $200,000 and $250,000 back in.

"These are very conservative figures, also, based on only 60 percent collection of the runs we make countywide," Broome said. Demeter said they would need a loan of $1.9 million for start up costs, and he had talked to the bankers that day and they had assured him it is no problem for Midway FD to get the money at as soon as the district needs it.

But the biggest problem, the chief said he believes, would be convincing county commissioners that Midway FD could indeed do the job.

"We would have a lot of political legwork to do to convince some of them, at least, that we can do this. We have an advantage because we would just expand to the whole county what we already have in place here," Demeter said.

Thackeray cautioned, "One thing the county's RFP says is that you have to show you have experience in running an ambulance service. And we haven't. I know there are ways around that to show them we have run a first responder service, bur we have to keep in mind it will take a lot of documentation to show how we believe we can handle a countywide system."