WHEELING - Councilman Vernon Seals and Fire Chief Larry Helms have decided that city ambulances will only take patients to Wheeling Hospital and Ohio Valley Medical Center.
This means the new $107,000 ambulance City Council bought this week - and every other squad in the Wheeling Fire Department fleet - will no longer transport patients to East Ohio Regional Hospital in Martins Ferry, Belmont Community Hospital in Bellaire or Reynolds Memorial Hospital in Glen Dale.
"If someone is having a true emergency in the city of Wheeling, they should go to Wheeling Hospital or OVMC because those are the closest hospitals," Helms said.
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Photo by Casey Junkins
A Wheeling ambulance makes a stop at Ohio Valley Medical Center. Behind it is a Cumberland Trail ambulance from Belmont County.
Helms noted he gave the order to stop transporting patients to hospitals outside Wheeling last week after consulting with Seals.
"My objective is to make sure the citizens of Wheeling have access to an ambulance at all times," Seals said, while maintaining that taking the emergency vehicles outside city limits could endanger residents.
"I know of one particular time when Squad 1 (ambulance) went to East Ohio Regional. While they were over there, they got a call for service on (Wheeling) Island, but they couldn't get there because of a train crossing in front of the bridge," he said in reference to the Military Order of the Purple Heart Bridge that spans the back channel of the Ohio River between Wheeling Island and Bridgeport.
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= Council recently increased the charge for Basic Life Support from $200 to $279.89 per ambulance trip. Before March 5, 2003, the city charged $50 for BLS.
The increase from $50 to nearly $280 amounts to about a 460-percent increase over the past five years.
"We had to stop this because someone was eventually going to be stuck without an ambulance," Seals added.
Seals also said it should not matter if someone who lives in Martins Ferry, Bellaire or Glen Dale has a medical emergency while they are in the city of Wheeling because they should still go to the closest hospital.
"If I am in Pittsburgh, I am not going to expect the people up there to bring me back to Wheeling to go to the hospital," he said.
Jerry Kyle, director to the West Virginia Office of Emergency Medical Services, said Wheeling and other cities have the authority to control where their ambulances will travel.
"As long as they are meeting the medical needs of the patient, the city can set rules for things such as this," he said.
Helms said Wheeling Fire Department - which maintains two squads on full-time duty and a back-up squad for extraordinary circumstances - left city limits 40 times in 2007.
"Because less than 1 percent of our calls in 2007 went outside the city limits, this should not be that big of an adjustment," he said of the policy change.
Wheeling Hospital spokesman Gregg Warren said he was unaware of the decision, but did not believe it would have much of an impact on any of the hospitals.
"I don't think there are too many people in Wheeling who would be going across the river to go to the hospital," he said.
OVMC and EORH spokeswoman Maggie Espina also did not anticipate much of a change for these hospitals.
"I would not anticipate that any decision made by the city of Wheeling would have much of an impact on East Ohio Regional," she said.
In the event that Wheeling Hospital and OVMC would be overwhelmed with patients, Helms said fire department crews would consider leaving the city.
Seals also noted that a patient who has suffered great trauma may need to go to Morgantown or Pittsburgh to receive proper care.
"If there was no other way to get them there, I could see us taking the patient to those places, and I have no problem with that. I just think we need to make sure that the ambulance that our taxpayers pay for is available to them when they need it," he said.