The closing of Sharon Regional Medical Center has meant more work for other hospitals and that means more wait times for patients.
For local ambulance services, that means they are spending more time sitting with patients at the hospitals waiting for a patient to be assigned a bed. It’s called “wall time,” said Brookfield Fire Chief David Masirovits.
“We just had an incident the other night at Farrell hospital, it’s been a week now, where they were told the wait time was gonna be between 4 ½ and five hours for one of our residents,” Masirovits told the trustees Feb. 2. “We ended up calling our medical director (University Hospitals) who called the hospital who had the patient transferred to a bed. We had to get our medical direction involved because we couldn’t wait that long.”
Ambulance personnel don’t automatically turn over a patient to the hospital once they enter the emergency room, Masirovits said.
“Once we come to the house and pick you up and we enter the hospital you are considered under the care of the hospital, but until they assign a bed we are legally obligated to keep you on our cot,” he said. “We can’t say, ‘Go sit in that chair,’ unless they tell us. That means that if your wait time is four hours then we are stuck there for four hours.”
It’s not unusual to wait two to three hours at St. Elizabeth’s in Youngstown, he said.
“It’s becoming a standard, and it’s not right,” Masirovits said. “It’s taking our units out of service.”
Although the fire department wants to have five people on duty for every shift, the dearth of part-time firefighters and emergency medical personnel means that rarely occurs. There are days when only two people are on duty, and two people is the minimum to staff an ambulance, he said.
“If that ambulance is at a hospital for three hours, we are out of coverage for three hours,” Masirovits said.
“The good thing is we do have mutual aid,” said Trustee Dan Suttles. “Although it might not be as readily available, if our squad is at the hospital tied up, we do have other avenues to get you help.”
With Vienna’s ambulance out of service, the closest ambulances are in Hubbard and Liberty and those departments are “busier” than Brookfield, Masirovits said.
“It’s a scary thought but it’s probably not gonna become unusual on busy days to see trucks like Howland and Cortland around the center of Brookfield, just because everyone’s so busy and the hospitals are overwhelmed,” he said. “We encourage people to call EMS for all types of emergencies, but the old idea that you call an EMS truck to get you in the ER so you don’t have to sit in the waiting room is no longer.”
