Amid financial woes, rescue squad halts transport service

Jan. 18--The Haywood County Rescue Squad has suspended its transport services, a program that frees up EMS to better respond to medical emergencies.

In the wake of the financial woes that led to the temporary halting of one of the organization's two major functions, the nonprofit's chief has resigned, along with most of the board, and it has terminated the transport services director and financial director positions. In the wake of the mass exodus, Grayson Sluder took over as chief.

"Right now, we're in the process of figuring out where we stand financially," he said. "We're finding out a lot of information that wasn't fully presented to the organization, so we're having to back up and figure out where we need to go financially."

The rescue squad performs two primary functions, with one side staffed by volunteers and the other by paid employees. Volunteers provide assistance on certain EMS calls, such as traffic accidents and cardiac emergencies, while also providing extra, standby ambulances and paramedics in cases when the county's ambulances become overburdened with emergency calls. Sluder said the organization will still provide that vital function, a function that saves the county a lot of money.

"EMS would have to put on three more trucks per day, which is a total of six paramedics per day," Sluder said, adding that the average paramedic, when factoring salary and benefits, costs Haywood about $60,000 per year.

The rescue squad's other primary function, the one that requires paid employees, is to transport patients on a non-emergency basis. For example, transport services may bring patients back to either area nursing homes or to hospitals in the central or eastern part of the state that might have greater capabilities than local ones. That is the service that is currently suspended.

Although the rescue squad was able to scrape together enough funds to pay its employees for the first two weeks of January, the well has now dried up.

The issue goes back to proper completion of required tasks to receive payment for each transport. After finishing a transport, the medical charts for a patient are supposed to be turned into Medicare, Medicaid or an insurance company to bill them for the service provided.

"What we've found is basically that stuff wasn't getting turned in that should have been turned in," Sluder said, noting that they found 129 charts that hadn't been submitted.

Normally, the on-duty supervisor is supposed to scan the chart. After that, it is sent to the transport services director, then the financial director, and ultimately the company or organization being billed.

"Somewhere between transport services director and financial director something wasn't getting turned in," he said, adding that both the transport services director and the financial director, as well as the prior chief whom Sluder relieved, resigned.

Because transport services aren't being provided by the rescue squad, the burden now falls back onto Haywood County EMS, meaning they will be busier day-in and day-out.

Haywood County Emergency Services Coordinator Greg Shuping didn't comment on any specifics regarding the rescue squad or how its issues might affect other county medical services, but he did offer words of support.

Specifically, he highlighted the fact that, when it was founded in 1958, the organization was the first ever all-volunteer paramedic organization in the country and provided all of Haywood County's paramedics until the 1980s.

"This county solely depended on the rescue squad for paramedic services, and they should be proud of that," he said.

"We can't do without them," he said.

Sluder wanted to make it clear that the rescue squad, as a whole, isn't in jeopardy, and that they are hard at work figuring out how to get the transport services back up and running.

"Have faith in us," he said. "We're going to work ourselves through this. Know we're not shutting our doors, and we're going to keep providing these services to our residents and visitors."

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