Listen to the Radio Interview

Interview Transcribed

John:
We got one of our favorite friends, guests from the community, Tina from LifeNet, in here with us this morning. And how’s it going, Tina?

Tina:
It is fantastic.

John:
All right. Going well, she says. And EMS week, I don’t know whether it was month or what.

Anna:
It’s every day, all day, but EMS Awareness Week is next week.

Tina:
It goes Sunday through Saturday. And we have a lot of fun stuff planned for our staff and for first responders in the community. So that’ll be good.

John:
And EMS … people think about that and they go, what does that cover, EMS?

Tina:
Yeah, it covers a lot.

John:
Yeah, it does a lot.

Tina:
A lot more than maybe it should even sometimes. I don’t mean that it’s a bad thing. But our EMTs, paramedics and dispatchers, basically anytime you have a medical emergency, we’re there in the community day or night, 24/7/365. So we respond to just about everything.

One of the things we’ve talked about in the past is what are the appropriate reasons to call us and what aren’t the appropriate reasons to call us. That’s appropriate to discuss as we kind of go into EMS week next week?

First, we just want to thank the Emts and paramedics for all that they do and our dispatchers. But then the other part of it is just making sure that people understand there’s a right time to call us. We need those people available for strokes. We need those people available for heart attacks, for cardiac arrests, for traumatic injuries, major car accidents, any of those reasons. Maybe you have bleeding that you cannot control.

Anna:
You need oxygen.

Tina:
You can’t breathe, and you need oxygen right away. You have a mobility issue. And you can’t be transferred in a car. You need to be transferred on a stretcher, in an ambulance. Those are all reasons to call.

Anna:
So if I broke my finger, drive myself to the hospital.

Tina:
Yes. Or a loved one. Have a loved one. I mean, if you’re in major pain.

Anna:
If you broke your hip, that’s a different thing. That’s a whole other thing.

John:
Yeah, that’s a good analogy, because I helped take care of my aunt, who is like in her early 90s, and she’s at an assisted living type place, and sometimes she’ll take a fall or whatever. I’m not trying to diss the people at this because they kind of go by protocol, but immediately they want to call the ambulance. Wait a minute. Let me call her and look and make sure that hey, are we okay? Yeah. Can I get you up and wait? Because it wastes their time. The EMS, like you said, they may be getting a call for somebody that’s having a life changing or ending moment with a stroke or heart attack or something like that or a bad accident to come over. Let’s see first then if you’re pretty sure that I think we may have something broken, then call. Otherwise, use your friends and family. Can they help you?

Tina:
Call a friend or family member first. Even if you can go by Uber, if you don’t have transportation, but it’s not life threatening and you can go by Uber, a couple of things happen. One, if your friends and family can help you again, like you said, doesn’t tap the system for something non-emergent. Two, we have a lot of people that utilize us and they get to the emergency room and they really don’t even need the emergency room. And that emergency room is overcrowded a lot of the times because of the same reasons as we are. We have a lot of people. They just don’t know where they can go. And we have a lot of great resources in the community that you can utilize instead of an emergency room and instead of 911.

Anna:
The walk in clinics. Yes, that’s what their purpose is to triage. What’s triageable and send the high risk to the hospitals. Doctor Young can do my finger. Do I really want to go to the emergency room?

John:
No. You’d rather not because they are full and it takes a good while to get to you and you don’t cut the line. They check you out. And if it’s touch and go situation, then they treat you right away like you told us before. And if it’s just something like her finger, they’re going to send you back on out there that will get to you as soon as we can.

Tina:
It is not uncommon for us to take a patient in and they triage them and then they send them out into the waiting room. So just because you go by ambulance, it’s does not mean you get a hospital room immediately. They have to triage you in the order of all the patients that they have there and there are patients that have arrived ahead of you, patients with severe injuries, and then again, the patients who maybe aren’t emergent.

John:
Right. I’m talking about EMS. I’m just going to throw this in here, whether it be EMS or the fire Department, firefighters going out on some type of call because they go out on accident calls sometimes and all kinds of things. Stop. If you’re driving, stop. They’re trying to get through these crowded intersections and people going on through them like normal or whatever, and they’re coming through on a mission.

Stop, listen, pull over to the side. Stop. Let them go by. It’s only going to take about 10 seconds and they’ll be past you and then you go on.

Tina:
But it’s the same thing when you see us on scene. I can tell you, not in our area recently, thank God. But not far away from us. Just this year we’ve lost people on scene or people have lost a rig. I mean, you think about a huge fire truck that you ran into the back of because you weren’t willing to pull over. Something in your life was more important than that. That’s expensive. Any of us who lose an apparatus is expensive, but a life is irreplaceable. So take that moment and just stop. There’s a reason you’ve been delayed, but it’s not nearly as bad as the person who’s going through that accident.

Anna:
Correct.

John:
Right. So, yeah, please do that. Employment. You’re still looking for people all the time.

Tina:
We are, yes. And I have some exciting news to share, too.

John:
Good.

Tina:
So the EMT program, I think the last time I was on, you kind of had to pay for it out of pocket. Right. I’ve learned a lot since the last time I was on. And so first off, if you’re looking at becoming an EMT, The University of Arkansas Hope Texarkana has the Arkansas Future Grant. You can apply for that. And EMT is covered in that. Texarkana College, you can use the Pell grant for their EMT program. They’ve restructured their EMT program for college credit, so you can use a Pell Grant for that. And then outside of that, we’ve partnered also with the Arkansas Fire Training Academy. And so we’re fixing to hire our first two EMTs straight off the street, not certified. They’ll go to school starting in July and go for a six week program, and they’ll go to work for us. And then we are going to start hiring again for that for another September start. So there’s lots of options o get the program paid for for you, and you’re pretty much guaranteed a job as long as you’re a good person.

We’re looking for people who are what we call humble, hungry and smart. And by smart, I don’t mean obviously, we want you to be intelligent, but we want you to know how to get along with people.

Anna:
Right. Social skills are important.

Tina:
Yeah. That’s what we’re looking for. And you really have an opportunity to serve your community full and part time. We’re going into the summer months. We have teachers that work for us, believe it or not.

Anna:
Yes.

Tina:
They work for us during the summer time and then pick up a few shifts throughout the year. But teaching is their primary thing. We have people that it can be a part time job. You can work for us just on the weekend, pull a night shift here or there. So it can be a full time opportunity or a part time opportunity just to give back to your community. But there is a national shortage of EMTs and paramedics. So if you’re interested, my cell phone is 903-556-0301 . If you know somebody that’s interested, that’s great. Call me.

John:
And I don’t know if you need any right now, but on the other side of it, on the office side of it, the dispatcher.

Tina:
Yes, the dispatch side. It’s another great way to get in. So we have a lot of people that will call us, and they’re like, I’ve always been interested in EMS. I just don’t know that I could do the blood side of it, but I want to give back. Okay, well, let’s talk about being a dispatcher. We actually have a pretty cool selection process for that. It’s designed to help you figure out on the front end if it is right for you.

So it starts with a two hour Criticall test. I know that sounds like a lot of time, but you really test a lot of the different skills you’re going to have to use, and you kind of sit in a setting and go, maybe I would enjoy this, or maybe this isn’t for me.

Anna:
Maybe I just need to bring you all some Gatorade, right?

Tina:
Yeah. And then if you get through that Criticall Test and you pass the test, then we schedule you for a shadow interview. So you come in and you shadow in the Comm Center for 4 hours. This gives you an opportunity to really understand what it’s like to only be a responder who can hear and have to use your verbiage to coach people through what’s going on. And most of the time, you don’t know what goes on on the other end at the end.

Anna:
Right. So the ambulance arrives on scene and you’re onto your next call.

Tina:
I admire all of the men and women that work back there in our Comm Center. It’s an awesome calling, and we have some people have been doing it a long time. Our Star of Life, Stacey Himes. She just got back from Washington, DC, representing us there. She’s been one of our dispatchers I think since the late 90s. She’s been doing this and is just a major asset. She’s part of our training program. If you’re interested in it. We train you from beginning to end. It’s about a year long training program. You’ll also go to EMT school as part of that.

Anna:
Okay. How old do you have to be to apply?

Tina:
18.

Anna:
Okay. 18 with a high school graduation?

Tina:
Yes. You have to have a high school diploma and a valid driver’s license to become an EMT ,dispatcher, any of the positions.

John:
Just little things to know. And you’ve told us before, but I’ve slept since then. The difference in training between EMT and next step up.

Tina:
A paramedic. So an EMT is a semester long course, or if you do in a quick class about a six week condensed course, but you’re going every single day in the six week class. A paramedic is a year long course, or if you do an advanced class, it could be as short as seven months. But most of the classes are a year long. And the difference in what you can do … the EMT basically, in essence they can’t break the skin. So they can take your blood pressure, your vital signs, assist the paramedic on scene, get supplies ready, in some cases they do transport, like if they’re taking somebody from the hospital maybe back home on a BLS truck. So BLS truck is just two EMTs and an ALS truck is a paramedic and an EMT. A paramedic can give medication and really do all the higher level stuff you think about when you think about the back of the ambulance.

John:
Anna, so if you or I were going to do it, we’d be the EMT part.

Anna:
Yeah

Tina:
There’s another option I don’t really talk about a whole lot but you can also take an emergency care attendant class which is called an ECA. That certifies you as a first responder and you can run with any fire Department as a first responder if they’ve accepted you on their department. And then the other side of it is you can work for LifeNet. All you can do as an emergency care attendant is drive the ambulance, but going back to that BLS unit, we can pair an emergency care attendant with an EMT.

So it’s another way to get started in the program, and most people who get their ECA certification get it through their fire Department, and all fire departments, just like us … the majority of them in our area are volunteers … and they are looking for volunteer firefighters left and right. They help us as well.

If you’re not sure if you want to be an EMT or a paramedic but you’d like to give back to your community — reach out to your local fire chiefs. If you’re not sure who your local fire chief is in your area, give me a call. I’ll get you in touch with them.

Anna:
That makes sense because together we can make our community better. It’s the only way to do it.

John:
So next week is EMS Awareness Week. As there anything else you’d like to say before we take to the radio part?

Tina:
Just thanks to our EMTs, paramedics, and dispatchers for all you do. We appreciate you guys.

John:
Absolutely! Thank you, and we’ll see you on the road.