Who could have predicted this outcome last year? Just about anyone that was paying attention to the City Council and City staff. Under the rubric that the city is growing in population at an alarming rate, especially "old people", the City Council has decided to acquiesce to the Fire Chief and take over all Emergency Services, which will "pay for themselves" and improve the response times and medical outcomes. More analysis of these claims will be forthcoming.
The principle issue with the County provided EMS service is that the response time is too long because the initial call comes into the Georgetown call center and then has to be re-entered into the WILCO call system so that an ambulance can be dispatched. With the ability to dispatch its own ambulances, the delay caused by poor communications between Georgetown and WILCO can be eliminated. This is true but at a large cost to the Georgetown taxpayers (the costs will be identified in a later post). What has been missed by our city leaders is that there are much cheaper solutions to the problem of poor communications between different government entities. For example consider the following from readyop.com.
"ReadyOp is an advanced concept for communications between mobile and/or fixed-based personnel across multiple responder agencies within a single or multiple jurisdictions, including law enforcement, EMS, fire, emergency management, schools and universities, hospitals, public works and more. ReadyOp also supports multi-jurisdictional mutual aid plans, allowing public safety agencies from different jurisdictions with different and incompatible communication systems and networks with disparate voice radio systems to communicate and share information seamlessly."
There are likely other companies that have solutions that will enhance overall communications among various departments and agencies at a very nominal cost. It just takes a clear definition of the problem to be solved and due diligence in procuring a solution.
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