Health care providers in Northwest Missouri are not surprised by a report from the American Heart Association that patients in rural areas get quicker care waiting for an ambulance than by driving themselves to the hospital.
“Especially with patients that have chest pain or something related to a heart attack,” said Brooke Boland with Buchanan County Emergency Service. “The concept that we just transport people to the hospital, that we pick them up and basically are just providing a taxi service is not true. We actually start providing care the minute we arrive on scene to the patients.”
Dr. Robert Grant with Mosaic Life Care says it’s important that heart patients be evaluated by well-trained personnel who can start lifesaving in the field. He said EMS can send an EKG directly to the hospital or doctor.
“If a person is having a heart attack out in a rural area and provided we have cellphone coverage they can send an EKG that alerts me,” Grant said. “It kind of gives you a little bit of a heads up of what kinds of things you will expect in route or what you see when you get to the emergency room. When we get our tables prepared for the procedure things that we might normally have set out like a temporary pace maker things like that, all that is available.”
Dr. Grant said he remembers cases in which calling rather than driving saved a life.
“One of them is a 26-year-old gentleman who lives just over the river,” Grant said. “EMS was there, they applied an AED offered deliberation, put him back into a normal rhythm and then we were able to reestablish flow in the artery. That young gentleman would have died had they started off across the river.”
He said he also remembers an opposite outcome in a patient driven to the hospital. The man was driving on 36 highway to work in Saint Joseph when he began having serious chest pain.
“As he turned off to come to Mosaic, at that time it was Heartland there on the off ramp arrested and his son-in-law drove him at that point in time to the hospital and he did not make it,” Grant said.
Dr. Grant says you improve the odds in your favor when you contact EMS and activate a system that is there for a purpose.
The American Heart Association study found that 52 percent of severe heart attack patients in rural areas drove themselves or were driven to the hospital. But patients who called 911 got to the hospital faster and received lifesaving care quicker.