When providing emergency services to a community and/or region, it is only common sense that the citizens receive service promptly. In the Lompoc Valley, three separate and distinct organizations provide emergency medical response service. They are the Lompoc City Fire Department, Santa Barbara County Fire Department, and American Medical Response.
It is imperative that the taxpayer-funded emergency response system resources be managed effectively to gain the maximum benefit for the community. Minutes and seconds matter when life-threatening emergencies occur.
A life altering-medical emergency begins when a patient suffers a traumatic injury, heart attack, stroke, or other significant medical condition. Medical experts agree the first hour following the onset of these events is the most effective time for definitive treatment to begin.
When a situation like this occurs, someone dials 9-1-1, and it starts a series of actions to begin this treatment.
In the Lompoc, a Police Department dispatcher will answer your call and dispatch a fire crew with qualified emergency medical technicians. Then they must call the Santa Barbara County emergency communications center for a paramedic ambulance.
This process takes additional time, time which is critical in life-threatening situations. Why? Because the American Medical Response ambulance teams are trained and equipped to provide a higher level of care than the Fire Department.
The Lompoc fire chief explains how this process can be improved in the staff report:
“…integrated response begins with the first 911 call and is predicated on sending the closest resource, regardless of jurisdiction without delay. One fire dispatch center for all municipal fire and EMS units in the County (resource sharing) provides the closest and most appropriate fire resource response regardless of jurisdiction.”
In this way, those minutes and seconds can be saved, and critical patient care initiated sooner.
One example would be if a county fire unit or an AMR/county ambulance is in the city and is closer than the nearest Lompoc unit to your emergency, then they would be dispatched and get there to initiate care; currently, they wouldn’t even know an emergency was in progress close by.
A secondary and equal consideration is as the fire chief explains “Emergency Medical Dispatch (EMD) screening, which means 100% of calls are vetted using call type categorization, and customers are offered pre-arrival instructions by trained and qualified personnel as necessary.”
This means treatment begins when the call is placed and answered, a service not currently provided in Lompoc, once again saving precious minutes and seconds. It also means, when only an ambulance is needed for transportation, a fire crew would not be dispatched, thus reducing the number of overlapping calls for service and saving unnecessary wear and tear on the Fire Department vehicle fleet.
The fire chief said that if adopted, the Cooperative Dispatch Agreement financial commitment will be calculated on a per-call basis and due annually, which would save the LFD more than $350,000 in each biennial budget.
I want to be clear here. The following is not a criticism of the Police Department; it is simply questioning the logic used to fund the police dispatch center.
According to the staff report, the current expenditures for dispatchers is $2,225,065; currently, the Fire Department budget is providing $1,056,700 or about 50 percent of the dispatch staff. During the week of Oct. 23-29, the dispatch center answered 1,653 calls from citizens. Of those, 105, less than 10 percent, were for Fire Department service calls.
This is a typical weekly total, and this off-balance budget approach to funding the dispatch function has been occurring for many decades. It’s time to provide the stand-alone funding needed for the LPD dispatch center to function.
Until the Lompoc City Council meeting on Nov. 2, Lompoc was the only city in the county that had not agreed to join the Cooperative Dispatch Agreement. I believe that approving this agreement would be in the best interest of the community. Three council members also agreed when they passed the proposal, and now Lompoc is on the team.
But two councilmembers, Dirk Starbuck and Victor Vega, somehow couldn’t comprehend what this agreement would mean to public safety. Both have professed support for “public safety” when they were trying to persuade voters to elect them, but when it comes down to brass tacks, they just don’t get it.
Not only would taxpayers save money, but the community would be better served — two facts that seemed to slip past them. It will take more than a year for this new system to be fully implemented, however the service improvements are well worth the wait.
— Ron Fink, a Lompoc resident since 1975, is retired from the aerospace industry. He has been following Lompoc politics since 1992, and after serving for 23 years appointed to various Lompoc commissions, retired from public service. The opinions expressed are his own.
