The inside of the life-flight helicopter has room for three crew plus the patient. EMS and Fire crews were on hand for training in Saratoga on Saturday.
Pilot Cory Manning, shows the multi-million dollar life-flight helicopter flown in for SCWEMS training.
The South Central Wyoming Emergency Medical Services (SCWEMS) Joint Powers Board met on April 8, to discuss several issues facing the constantly evolving service that provides emergency services to the towns of Elk Mountain, Medicine Bow, Saratoga, Riverside, Encampment and Carbon County. SCWEMS also holds a separate year-to-year agreement with the town of Hanna.
The board met for nearly five hours at the Elk Mountain station where they were able to finally confirm that in its last meeting on March 11, the SCWEMS Board had eliminated the ambulance coordinator position and subsequently hired former coordinator Heidi Sifford as their new full-time ambulance director. The board still needed to hash out Sifford's actual job duties as well as amend and finalize some of the service's bylaws, but according to board member Mike Farver the most important issue was communication. "We need better communication from the board to all of our entities, we need better communication to our employees (and the community) about what we do and who we are."
The board discussed several ideas to help the flow of communication from the board to the ambulance director, to the station managers who are responsible for disseminating information to their individual employees and communities. Some of the proposed ideas involved better community outreach and an e-scheduling system to better work together more efficiently and avoid communication breakdowns between the various service stations. Farver emphasized the importance of better communication saying, "If we don't know what we do, if we don't know what equipment we have scattered everywhere. We're wasting money."
The board also heard from Carbon County Fire Warden John Rutherford about a lease disagreement issue at the Hanna fire station that the board and Rutherford worked to resolve by reviewing the language in the lease and agreeing to build a separate office within the fire station for the EMS crews to work out of.
From March 11 to April 8, each entity reported its number of ambulance runs for the month. The numbers reported were: Elk Mountain with 14 runs, Encampment at 13 runs, Hanna at 28 runs, Medicine Bow at 13 runs, and Saratoga with 45 runs.
The next SCWEMS board meeting will be at 6:30 p.m. in the Saratoga SCWEMS ambulance station on May 13.
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