LOYAL. LOCAL. COMPLETE.
PARIS—Legal liability may be brewing in southern Clark County for a local ambulance service, as revealed during a Monday, Dec. 9 Edgar County Board study session.
According to Samantha McCarty, Horizon Health’s director of emergency services, calls for assistance from emergency dispatchers below Edgar County’s southern border have steadily increased, even after Clark County approved improvements to its ambulance services in 2022. McCarty reported Horizon Health, which furnishes five ambulances and staffs three at all times, has been called to assist Clark County’s ambulance service, which operates two ambulances, 16 times in the last year. Seven of those calls have come in the last two months alone.
One particular call required a Horizon Health ambulance to travel roughly 12 miles south of Martinsville, McCarty told a Prairie Press reporter after Monday’s session. The ambulance’s response time was 35 minutes.
“That’s a really long time if something is really bad,” McCarty said. “If somebody’s having a seizure, or they are having chest pain or if they’ve fallen, that’s a really long time to wait to get services and help.”
McCarty explained the calls only come when Clark County ambulances are already occupied at another scene. While responding to calls in Marshall and northern Clark County is doable, paging an ambulance from Edgar County to a call in southern Clark County poses risks not just to the patient, but to the service provider.
McCarty’s primary concerns are legal liability and unit availability. Per Horizon Health’s contract with Edgar County, two ambulance units must be active and inside the county at all times. Still, the mutual aid agreement that exists between Edgar and Clark County muddies the waters regarding how McCarty and her team should respond.
“If we don’t have two responders in this county … how can we respond to their district? But, if we do have an ambulance sitting here with somebody in it, and we don’t respond because we’re bound by contract to have two, and that person has a bad outcome, who’s liable?” McCarty asked board members. “It says nothing about that in any of the contracts, the statutes, anything. So there just needs to be a little more clarification.”
A potential amendment to the inter-county mutual aid agreement could include a clause allowing a ranking Horizon Health staff member to determine whether to send a unit to a long-distance call or hold back and request Clark County dispatchers to look for assistance elsewhere. Another proposed change could revert Horizon Health’s required coverage zone to the state-mandated distance of 20 miles from the provider’s base of operations. That area would include Marshall but exclude much of Clark County’s southern portion.
McCarty was quick to clarify Horizon Health would still respond to calls in the southern portion of Clark County as long as they had the personnel on hand to avoid violating their contract with Edgar County.
“Not to say we won’t respond there, not to say we’re not going to be a good neighbor, but it gives us a little bit more protection,” she explained.
During the discussion with the Edgar County Board, McCarty confirmed that mutual aid agreements with ambulance service providers in Chrisman and Kansas would still be honored after any changes, since parts of northern Edgar County would fall outside the state-mandated 20-mile circumference. Currently, Horizon Health is responsible for providing ambulance services in Special Ambulance Service Area No. 1, which includes the seven southern townships in Edgar County.
According to McCarty, a map of the 20-mile coverage area is being drafted. Edgar County chairman Jeff Voigt requested a copy of the map once it’s complete. No official action was taken on the matter.