The Newton County Board of Supervisors will be having monthly accountability meetings with CareMed and will possibly be sanctioning the ambulance company if does not live up to its contractual agreement to provide adequate ambulance service to Newton County.
According to its contract with the county, the ambulance service, which is based in Oxford, must provide three fully-staffed advanced life support ambulances at all times with one ambulance stationed each in Union, Newton and Decatur. If it doesn’t live up to that agreement, the supervisors are wanting to add language to the contract to penalize the company monetarily against its $25,000 annual contract.
“What we’ve done as a board, we are going to add a provision to our contract to find a mechanism to penalize CareMed for failure to not have the amount of trucks here, trying our best to get them fully staffed,” Board Chairman Jacky Johnson said. “We’re going to have monthly accountability meetings.”
The details of that agreement have yet to be approved in an open meeting. board attorney Jason Mangum said they would likely be passing that amended contract at a later meeting. Its next meeting will be at 10 a.m. Monday, Aug. 2. Since the board met again on Monday, they will not have their normal second meeting on the third Thursday, which is tomorrow.
The board of supervisors met with CareMed officials during an executive session in Monday’s meeting. The board gave reasons of “litigation” and “personnel” for the executive session. When asked if they discussed personnel in executive session, Mangum said the main reason was pending litigation and that no county employees were discussed during the executive session.
Stan Alford, owner of CareMed, said they are working to make sure they have three available each day.
“There’s no doubt that we had a catastrophic failure in the system,” Alford said. “It was a majority of human error. We made some changes immediately when that failure happened. We have new county level manager. We have seen some improvement since then. We’ve hired four new paramedics and EMTs. Two of them have already started. Two of them, we are waiting for the insurance people to add them to our insurance. I’ve got some paramedics that want to come to work, but they’re holding off to see how this pans out and how our relationship with the board will continue to be.”
Beat 2 Supervisor Joe Alexander said the 911 office is keeping track of how many ambulances are available in the county at any given time.
“I know for the last seven days, they have had three fully-staffed ambulances every day except yesterday,” Alexander said. “I’ve called up there every day about 9 a.m. and (911 coordinator) Ms. Alyssa (Middleton) has kept track of how many ambulances are available. I just want to know that we have been making progress.
“I told them that since this issue came up, they will be watched like a hawk. I’ve been calling Alyssa every day. The only way I know how to answer a question out on the street is for me to know what I’m talking about.”
While residents can call up to the 911 office can inquire about ambulances that are available, County Administrator Steve Seale cautioned everyone not to call up there as it could take dispatchers away from emergency calls.
Mangum said they are still negotiating what the penalties will be.
“We’ve got to provide some additional assurances to not only make sure that everyone is doing everything they say they’re going to do, but to have some teeth to ensure that happens,” Mangum said.
Beat 4 Supervisor Charles Godwin said that the main reason for the executive session is because ending the contract with CareMed was on the table.
“If they hadn’t come in here and made some statements that gave us assurances to do better, we might have been talking about removing it today,” Godwin said. “And that’s the main reason why we went into executive session. Typically if you were working for a company and you were about to be terminated, then you wouldn’t want all of the other employees in the room to hear the discussion.”
