McCormick Ambulance this week acknowledged that it should have notified the Hermosa Fire Department that its ambulance would be later than initially thought for a medical call on Sept. 7. The response time came to light when the patient’s stepfather, Norm Potter, complained at the Sept. 11 City Council meeting that a McCormick ambulance took 24 minutes to arrive.
Potter’s stepson undergoes dialysis six times a week and has had three organ transplants. Hermosa Beach paramedics arrived at the patient’s home on 11th Street within five minutes, but the city did not have any available ambulance operators to transport the man to a local hospital. Although the fire department is staffed with full-time firefighter paramedics, the department also has part-time ambulance operators responsible for transporting non-life threatening emergencies, such as Potter’s stepson.
As part of its mutual-aid agreement with neighboring cities, Hermosa Beach and Manhattan Beach will call each other for available ambulance operators, who are also emergency medical technicians. On Sept. 7, however, neither Manhattan Beach nor Hermosa Beach had any available ambulance operators, so McCormick was called.
Fire department officials stress that the patient’s life was never in jeopardy during the wait, and paramedics remained at his side until a McCormick ambulance arrived.
McCormick Chief Financial Operator Rick Roesch said that when his company received the call from Hermosa Beach on Sept. 7, a McCormick ambulance said that it would arrive within 8-10 minutes. McCormick has a contract with Redondo Beach and stations its ambulance in Redondo, and that was the ambulance initially sent to Hermosa Beach to respond to the call from Norm Potter for his stepson.
However, after receiving the call from Hermosa Beach, McCormick received an emergency call from Redondo Beach and had to send an ambulance stationed in Hawthorne to Hermosa Beach instead.
“We should have called them just as policy and alerted them to the fact that that unit was going to be later because we had to divert the first unit and sent the second unit,” said Roesch, adding that the McCormick ambulance arrived at Potter’s home 22 minutes after receiving the call from the HBFD.
McCormick covers an area from the Ventura County line to Carson and Palos Verdes, Roesch said. McCormick does not have any contractual obligations to Hermosa Beach or Manhattan Beach, but regularly transports patients when those cities do not have ambulance operators available.
Roesch said in 2011, McCormick was called 112 times to transport patients from Hermosa Beach to local hospitals. Of those, 70, or 62.7 percent of the time, an ambulance arrived in less than 8 minutes and 59 seconds, the standard response time in L.A. County, Roesch said.
An ambulance arrived in 9-15 minutes 41 times, and one time an ambulance arrived in more than 16 minutes, Roesch said.
This year, McCormick has transported 95 patients from Hermosa Beach to local hospitals, with an ambulance arriving on the scene in less than 8 minutes 59 seconds 69 times, or 72.6 percent of the time. An ambulance arrived between 9 and 15 minutes 22 times, and four times did an ambulance arrive in more than 16 minutes.
All patients forced to wait more than 16 minutes were not life-threatening emergencies, Roesch said.
Roesch said he is proud of his company’s response rate, which is better in cities where McCormick is contracted to provide care.
In those contracted areas, McCormick responds to about 240 emergency calls per day, and 96 percent of the time an ambulance arrives in less than 8 minutes 59 seconds, Roesch said. Their contractual requirement is to respond in that time frame 92 percent of the time, and McCormick has never dipped below 96 percent any month.
“We do the absolute best we can to be there 100 percent of the time, and our goal is to be there a hundred percent of the time in our service area, where we are contracted,” Roesch said.
“As far as backing up other [cities], we are very, very happy to help,” Roesch said. “But we are positioned to take care of our cities.”
In written responses to questions, Fire Chief David Lantzer said the city is working to staff the EMT ambulance operators better. Because of the EMTs’ part-time schedule, there are times when Hermosa Beach’s EMT ambulance is not fully staffed, Lantzer said.
“Hermosa Beach is moving pro-actively to increase its ambulance-operator recruiting to have more staffing available, and the city appointed a new coordinator in August who is working to ensure more flexibility in ambulance-operator scheduling so our transport ambulances are more fully staffed,” Lantzer said.
Lantzer said Potter’s stepson was under the watch of paramedics Sept. 7, who respond to all medical emergencies and assess the patients. Paramedics also transport them to the hospital when the patients need paramedic care, such as an IV, CPR or other procedures, Lantzer said.
To ensure paramedics are available for other emergencies, patients who don’t need paramedic care are transported in ambulances staffed by ambulance operators, who are also EMTs, Lantzer said.
“We have turned to McCormick because it is the closest ambulance service to Hermosa Beach—other than Manhattan Beach,” Lantzer said. “We regret this delay, but we want to assure the community that this was an isolated incident. This is the first complaint I’ve received about a prolonged response time in the four years I’ve been with the city as chief.”
