besides a thirteen full time paramedics and two full time firefighter we have a host of other part time folks don't we correct we have about forty five part time firefighter mts and paramedics and eleven m s director solis tell us a little bit about mike monder was born and raised in stillwater minnesota came with over ten years experience working in both the private and public and firebase d m s went to century college let's talk a little bit about our burnsy medical services thirty five hundred calls per year what's that in tail and and what type of equipment are we running in people and such and such well we have a unique last twenty four hours a day we have three ambulances and an advanced life support fire engine that responds to any medical emergencies that are located throughout the city the stations are strategically located so that we can respond to emergencies in a timely manner they're staffed by a minimum of two people and at least one paramedic on each of those apparatus they respond from someone fell and needs help getting up to a structure fire it can depend on each different call as far as our firefighters paramedics and they're also complemented with police officer paramedics that respond in the system those medicals as well so all told our response time is what under six minutes under six minutes it's about five and a half minutes for the entire city on ever the entire city yes and is it i can't that's three ambulances and then one apparatus i presume that staff to go to you know car wrecks and fires in this type of thing yes and in addition to that we have those built in responders with the police officers too that help with those you know we can't forget that because i think that that's part of the equation that some people are forgetting is that we do have a large complement of police paramedics and that you know this the five and a half minute response time is probably  guess if a call came in with a heart attack and stuff that that response time is just really cut in half so right in there given the fact that they're on the street they cut that down and that's not factored into our response time because that that response time vehicles are fully equipped with the ls level so if someone had a heart attack or a diabetic reaction they can get there on the scene and treat them and that's the same with their staff to fire truck that's fully equipped for advanced life support so if they're closer to a called in an ambulance they can get there and begin that immediate life saving treatment the curious thing about the the ambulance and i'm not going to name any names or any community but just around us here i know there are several communities that are provided service by by one private provider and i've heard tonight or stand that at any given time there could be just one ambulance service seen large large area say from the same court river all the way to county yeah there's there can be large gaps in the service area depending on what they're called volume is and it's because it's so large the ambulances can be drawn to other areas the nice part about us having a strategic strategically located ambulance is that we know that we're going to have resources available to handle our calls around the clock three hundred sixty five days a year  in addition to that we have the ability to answer more a multitude of calls whether it be fire calls or even mass calls with their staffing model because all the paramedics are full time firefighters to that correct correct  cost there it becomes a benefit of where we have three ambulances on call twenty four seven you have the apparatus truck and plus you have at least probably least one or two p paramedics on duty at the same time and so i guess to the residents if you're going to have a heart attack or a medical emergency and in the twin city area maybe with probably the best place to have it it's a great place and i think all of our services in training prepare responders to be able to handle any type of call the they see a wide spectrum of cause and are prepared to deal with them and deal with them in a timely manner let's let's talk a little bit about our fire stations you know we're going to from five to three and let's have a little background on that and then we'll get into the new station yeah in twenty two thousand and ten and even into two thousand and nine the administration began looking into these changes and it's harder and harder to recruit and retain volunteers to be able to willing to give up time in their life and their busy lives to come back to these calls so this staffing little gear and tease that we have people there around the clock before it wasn't necessarily a guarantee when you're relying on someone to come from home drive to the fire station and then drive out to the call we still had full time staff at that time but as call volumes increase it's harder and harder to get out all those calls and have a good response time so now we're guaranteed that we have those three ambulances and that fire apparatus along with the police paramedics and i really think just run a full time staffing model where we always guarantee that we're going to have resources available to respond to any kind of call that we get i suppose as with in a medical emergency or a fire you know the  first few minutes are the critical and so i know that you know our goal is to be on the scene as quickly as possible to put out the fire and if it gets larger than what we can handle we have automatic and mutual aid from our surrounding cities any or any house fire we automatically get mutual aid through our neighboring cities and that's ok one has a full time e m s component plus fire department in roseville and in the white bears at the other one we use little canada nor same pole in oakdale primarily give depending on where it's in the area and they have very quick response times to help us out on those larger level calls additionally we bring we have pagers that people still will respond back to the stations and sometimes they'll respond to the scene or else sometimes they'll just help to cover cover other calls that may occur within the city and so that's why with the other two stations that we've kind of furloughed we still keep a truck in there even though say the loudon lane station i think there's what maybe three part time firefighters that whole south lake there and so there really isn't enough part timers to staff  station but i suppose if you had a full call up in the pagers that that those folks down there would go to that station and respond with a truck because that is that how it works yeah that's how it would work is they would respond to the station and then go to the call if needed or stand by and again which is why we changed the staffing models we can always rely on people's availability outside of their normal work so i think you know with well what we have laid out we definitely provide a great response and talked about response times we focus on response times but we focus more on how great of care we provide to the people once we get there so the response times are important the level of care that we're providing is important and it's really an entire picture that we focus on to make sure that people are we're getting to people in a timely manner taking great care of them get to the hospital so they can return home to their loved ones after they have a medical emergency to put myself who i am all on the line for the citizens of the city and by that i mean i get to give them my all every day i get to change somebody's life potentially i get to make them feel comfortable at their worst and if i can leave that person with a sense of comfort with a sense of that i'm there for them to trust in and then my job's done f it comes time to do it there's not a person that i work with on this department store in adjoining can join in agencies that they don't do everything that they can and they don't put their all in their heart into it to save so another's life fall you know you can you can and  you can say with a smile that you've actually got to save someone's life or you've actually got to make a difference and we think one of the best times i can think of and i'm not going to say the cardiac arrest like everybody thinks is maybe somebody who just has that diabetic who has really low blood sugar who if you weren't there to make a difference just keep circling and circling the drain until finally light ceases for  them i think that's one of the big game changer where we do a few simple things and we make a big difference and it's in the response you get from people they're calling you at their worst their worst time whether it's from a nosebleed to i can't breathe or to let them know that you're here for them no matter what if you're really passionate about your job people show up around the corner people that you're working with all the time and let you know how  it was there was really great you know to actually have a feel for what what the experience and what goes on during a call so let's let's continue on with the discussion of how does  what's involved in becoming a paramedic sort of speak a paramedic they go through it's a two year degree program so they're in school full time for almost two years and that's you know i went through century colleges programs all throughout the m up the country so they say they dedicate a significant part of their lives to becoming a paramedic and then they go through clinical rotations for three to six months is that on top of the two years you know that's as part of that that's a an internship as part of your two year degree so they get a lot of great field experience and then a lot of them work with different agencies was that we've had several people that have gone through paramedic school while being employed with us as well in the also take the fire fighter one and two where they're going through a paramedic school or is that in addition to the training that's in addition to and the workload that's on a paramedic is a lot so a lot of people don't take the courses concurrently so between their fire training and the e m s training just initially is i mean that's a huge commitment is that about one two and a half year three year commitment at least a two and a half year if not more and several of our firefighters and paramedics continue to take courses after that to improve themselves in addition to that the ongoing training is is is a lot a seventy two hours every two years they go through continuing at a minimum to maintain their licenses they have several licenses and certifications that they have to keep up so there's higher levels of paramedic and stuff like that i suppose those that can do certain procedures or something like that yes in our medical directors very good at making sure that the city  always is on the cutting edge of providing advanced level procedures whatever's new and out there where we're basically doing and that medical director ship that's provided by by a doctor out of health east isn't it s john's hospital yeah dr peter taking out of st john's he's their emergency room medical director and the medical director for us and he's always to be attending training and going on calls and constantly teaching our paramedics to be critical thinkers and really improve upon the great job that they're already doing ok as we actually kind of operate under his license don't we yes all of the paramedics in the mts all you must providers operate under his license and he has a vested interest in  forty a mouse and he definitely shows that he's very involved in everything that we do that i think you reviews all the the different runs and reports and stuff like that that the per hour paramedics do and i don't believe st johns charges anything for that service that's really a great great benefit to the city of maplewood yeah he provides a great service and our associate medical director bjarne peterson that they sit on a committee a quality assurance and caught improvement committee with us so that we're always evaluating runs and making sure that we're providing a great level of care and also looking for opportunities for improvement and seeing how we can run more smoothly and efficiently going into the future you know that's something i don't see because quite frankly i never get any complaints from the public for as far as our primitive service goes our response times you know it's just you know i get more by dog complaints i do complaints on the provision of medical emergency medical services tell us a little bit about the actual ambulance themselves you know we we see them on the t v we actually saw them operating here and on the clips but moving parts of the ambulance but what's in the back of the ambulance is really the key for us in the a mouse and we basically bring an e r out an emergency room out to the field so that what he does there we have cardiac monitors a dvance cardiac monitor so we can read and your twelve lead e k g so we can call the cath lab from the field and say this person is having a heart attack we need to bring the men in we'll bring them straight into the cathode well where is what so we provide enhanced stroke care heart care we're taking a lot of initiatives to improve cardiac arrest management we have an automated c p r device we take a team approach to everything that we do and there really is with the medications and the equipment that we have back there we really do provide state of their care plus the basic medical services of cuts and bruises right yeah we'll handle anything you know we help people off from the ground all the time that just need help getting out up to the most advance call and we really focus on being a customer service oriented emergency medical service so that hopefully we're you know we don't want to get those complaints we want people to call and say we appreciate the job that they d know one of the down sides of the of this whole thing of providing thirty five hundred runs or assists per year just off the cuff how many of those are  medicare or government insurance type things well our our mix is a we have what seventy four percent of the people that we serve that we transport each year we are either on medicare medical assistance or don't have any insurance so because of medicare rules we only collect a certain percentage which is is really not a lot and compared to the like three years three hundred forty dollars or something like that yeah it's less than four hundred it's around four hundred dollars but it depends on the call and how they tend rated in their scale and are called normally run what we have we have to bill out what about two thousand dollars or run yeah our average charge is about two thousand and eighty dollars collect about seven hundred on average and so people wonder why it's so expensive well it's it's a whole health care thing where where the insurance or the pain pete customers are having to pick up the costs for the for the ones that you know we have to kick except reimbursement rates are lower than cost to service level and then people wonder why we're levying for emergency medical services as well that's that's the reason right there if if if everybody paid their bill we could drop the cost of the the runs down and and still  have a break even or in some of these cases a profit making enterprise but that's not the function or the provision of services that we provide right if we collected everything that we build  would definitely be making a profit each year we can give you a raise and that would be great but you know we do provide a great level of service and we can't control necessarily what the federal government is doing with those reimbursement rates so we continue to  provide that high level of service and i'm not against providing that service that's that's that's that's why we're all in the business but our citizens need to understand that you know we have to pay the bills and so that's why we have the general packs levy for emergency medical services if we did away with merge the medical services we wouldn't have the tax but then we'd be in a situation of some of these other communities where they may or may not have an ambulance in there in their city that's to me is unacceptable and i think it is important to note that although the refund doesn't necessarily make what we would like it to as far as retrieving all those billable costs it still does generate a significant amount of money for the city and those other cities that don't have an ambulance service are still relied upon to provide first responder services those fire trucks are still going out yourself to pay for that service but they're not getting any money in return so at least  criticizing the ferdi apartment specifically the emergency services in that it just i just scratch my head because this this is one of the basic services that communit on time and i just want to talk just a little bit about you know we're looking at day new fire station in the area three am i believe three m is is actually providing us some land at no  cost to to build that station and besides having the fire apparatus that would probably be one of our main ambulance stations would and yeah we would have an ambulance out of there and we believe that it's in a more strategic location to be able to run down to the south end of the city with that far south end within a five minute response time i would say between five and seven off the cuff i'm not exactly positive about the numbers because once we move that stations are in pretty bad shape and and hopefully the building inspectors don't look too closely at them or we could be in trouble the last point is in and i think maybe it's maybe it's a recruitment pitch you talked about you know the training and two and a half years or two years ago as for for paramedics probably another half year to get the firefighter one far far too certification just off the cuff for our younger audience what is the beginning paramedic just estimated guess makes  coming out of the country college the average paramedic is in the forty to fifty thousand dollars range that's not too bad in this this economy no it's actually it's pretty it's very competitive in my opinion and if you work for a public service agency such as the city of mayport for instance this retirement benefits that in this economy it's really competitive and so you know i we haven't even talked about our metro public safety training facility but hopefully when we get to phase two with century college i'm putting a classroom in there that there will have the paramedic training there the nursing training there the emergency dispatch the firefighter training and hopefully will there be some law enforcement training but hopefully down the road a piece we get the police skills training really make that a public safety training facility for the area and i think i'm just so proud that it's located in and maplewood yeah it's an exciting opportunity for us to have there is nowhere near that we can still stay available for calls and do real life training without having to go out to the city of st paul right now so to have in our own backyard is a great great resource for all the fire departments in the metro area i think our fire chief steve will consume a great job with that facility along with the fire chief from dale stillwater and like to hand on that steering committee and others like what twenty eight fire departments involved in this yeah roughly and it's so close if you go further east there was nowhere to train i'm from stillwater i was on store for a department for years and there was just nowhere where you could get that lifelike training in what they have done on that committee and by getting this bonding mine to be able to build the facility it's going to improve public safety both fire nehemias and hopefully like you said law enforcement ther is within that well i'm getting a high sign from our crack t t n crew that our time is up and so i really appreciate the work that you do mike again it's a tough job and for a guy that looks like he just got out of college you're you're you're holding the job remarkably well and i really appreciate you and your paramedics and firefighters including the park times for providing merge the medical services to the citizens of but that's all for today folks thanks for watching spotlight on maplewood and we'll see you next