Abbey Nutter
The Lebanon Democrat, Tenn.
(TNS)
Mar. 11—The Mt. Juliet Fire Department will be adding medical emergency response to its list of services on Monday.
"It's been on the horizon for several years," Mt. Juliet Fire Department interim chief Joseph Edwards said. " The Mt. Juliet City Commission had gotten to a point where they knew the city was growing at a really fast rate, and they needed to do something to add to services and supplement some things the county was providing to give an extra layer of protection for citizens and for visitors."
The Mt. Juliet Fire Department has already hired an additional 33 employees for the new service. The department currently has three ambulances ready to roll out Monday morning, and three more are on order.
"Most of our responders are already medically trained," Edwards said. "They have medical licenses, such as paramedics and AEMTs (advanced emergency medical technicians), as well as EMTs. It really doesn't change anything for us other than adding another vehicle to our fleet."
The new ambulances will operate out of the three primary fire stations in Mt. Juliet. On Monday morning, the transition will begin with Wilson County Emergency Management Agency (WEMA) and Mt. Juliet Fire Department officials coordinating to ensure that there are no breaks in coverage.
"The current method is that we go to all of those (medical) calls, and then, the county sends a transport vehicle to pick them up," Edwards said. "The only difference now is not only will our trucks go to that call, but it will be a city-owned ambulance versus a county-owned ambulance as the primary vehicle. The county will still back the city up and vice versa."
Emergency medical response in Mt. Juliet will be a partnership between WEMA and the Mt. Juliet Fire Department.
"It's both leaderships out of both organizations working together to form what's needed," Edwards said. "All we care about is taking care of the people."
A lot of the coordination after the service is in place will come through dispatch services.
"If a call comes in, we work very tightly with our dispatch to be in coordination with everything we do," Edwards said. "Their administration and our administration are in constant communication to work through logistical issues. There's minimal changes that need to be worked out logistically. Most of those are with dispatch, and those are being worked out now."
Edwards stressed that this will be a partnership between the Mt. Juliet Fire Department and WEMA, and that there will be no competition between agencies.
"It's a partnership between the county and the city," Edwards said. "We still have to support one another, because at the end of the day, it takes every one of us to do this job. We have 170,000 people in this county, and more than 40,000 are in Mt. Juliet. It's something that we absolutely have to coordinate together, because our small department is not designed to take care of that many people at one time. We have to have good partnerships, and we do."
The goal of adding the service is additional coverage for the city and protection for citizens.
"Any time you add another level of service, I always think it's for the better," Edwards said. "Emergency services are strapped all the time for responses. It's not uncommon for us to have more than one call at one time. I think this adds another level of protection for the citizens and for the community."
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