Letter to the editor: Eric Koons
Jan. 27, 2022
Vote yes to renew the EMS levy!
Like so many other islanders, I garden. I also save seeds. We all know that saving seeds is the best way to optimize plant performance. There are a multitude of factors that come to bear on a seed’s potential for success, micro climate and soil makeup, rainfall and light profiles, drainage and much more. These are distinctive to MY garden.
It occurs to me that this merger question is quite like seed selection. At harvest, I choose the seed from the plant that has outperformed all the rest in size, yield and flavor thereby promoting their gene expression into my future crop.
Our island EMS agency was homegrown from scratch, from a seed planted in 1977, and since, modified its protocols and equipment, system structure, personnel, management and mission statements to meet the challenges of our singular island environment. They kept what best served the community and let what wasn’t a perfect fit fall by the wayside. The paramedics and EMTs currently responding with San Juan Island EMS focus on medicine. They don’t have to split their training time on structural firefighting or wildland firefighting. They don’t have to maintain hazardous materials certifications or vehicle extrication. The fire department does that. They do it well.
The EMTs and paramedics at San Juan Island EMS currently train on providing you the best prehospital care possible. Their focus is centered around basic and advanced life support and critical care certifications. The paramedics maintain advanced cardiac life support, pediatric advanced life support and neonatal resuscitation program certifications. They have wilderness medicine certifications. They stay proficient at performing critical airway maneuvers and the use of ventilators. They review the ever-evolving pharmacology formulary and the use of IV pumps. They study state of the art techniques for treating multisystem trauma patients. There is only so much time in a day. I want my prehospital providers training on the best evidence based medical care they can provide, not on extinguishing fires.
In the city, mutual aid is easily accessible from neighboring agencies when more help is needed. We are surrounded by water, so can’t count on a timely response from anyone. In the city, you can load a patient into an ambulance and transfer them to a hospital with specialists who can quickly treat a cardiac or stroke condition or a trauma patient. San Juan Island EMS has evolved to accommodate all the challenges of living on a remote island and they have done that exceptionally well. These adjustments led to the agency having the best rural cardiac save rate in the country year after year despite the disadvantage of the requisite half hour flight to the mainland between the call and the cath lab.
Angry voices in the levy debate, as of late, would have us believe the best way to move into the future is to suddenly pivot away from the finely-honed, time tested system now in place and adopt a new model because a volunteer advisory group formed in 2018 suggested it and that we should follow the lead of Detroit, Tampa, Baltimore, Portland or who knows where else. Do we really want to trade what we have for an untested, one size fits all model? I wouldn’t buy seeds that were propagated for far flung places and I wouldn’t pattern our Emergency Medical System after places that don’t share our unique environmental challenges. I trust our community will vote yes to renew and preserve our current EMS system. There are signs around town designed to confuse, conflating voting no with saving EMS. Don’t fall for it, the goal there isn’t to save EMS but to break its back, that it might be more vulnerable to being subsumed by fire.
Save EMS vote yes!
Eric Koons