BLACKSVILLE — Two medical emergencies in recent months made a de facto ambulance driver out of Donna Varner.
The first was when her husband suffered a heart attack in their home. The second was when a family member who lives close by was felled by a stroke.
Varner lives in the Blacksville area on the rural, western end of Monongalia County.
In both cases, she bundled the stricken family in her car and started out for Morgantown.
Plenty other residents have done the same, she said.
“I know we live out,” she said. “That’s by choice. But you can’t wait 45 minutes to an hour if it’s a medical emergency.”
That’s how long it can take for a Mon Health EMS ambulance, even with lights and siren, to make the haul to her home on winding W.Va. 7 from Morgantown.
And that’s why she was among the 20 or so western Mon residents — plus first responders from other area medical crews — who came out to the Blacksville VFD hall on Sunday afternoon.
Mon Health EMS Executive Director David Custer, a paramedic and retired Morgantown Fire officer, said he wanted to update residents on coming changes to how ambulances are dispatched to calls.
Especially now, he said, since WVU Hospitals is putting its own fleet of medical response vehicles on the road.
Under the county’s current mutual aid contract, calls that come into MECCA 911 go through a rotation, with Mon Health EMS always getting first dibs.
Star City Emergency Medical Services is second in the rotation, followed by Jan-Care Ambulance Service, which is third.
HealthTeam Critical Care Transport, the new offering from WVU Hospitals, is now fourth in that rotation, even though the hospital originally balked — saying it should be a matter of who is closest to the call, not who is necessarily in rotation.
“We’re not neglecting you on this end of the county,” Custer said, as some of the questions and comments from the audience grew heated and terse.
Custer said while Mon Health EMS, the county’s first ambulance care company, is in the process of trucking out new GPS mapping and zoning for emergency response here, any contract particulars concerning ambulance rotation — or anything else — will have to be taken up with the Monongalia County Commission, the body that negotiated the current mutual contract, which is in effect until 2019.
County Commissioner Sean Sikora, the only one of the county’s three commissioners to attend the presentation, said it wouldn’t be easy to break the contract or simply do away with the rotation system, since it is in writing.
“You can’t just make changes willy-nilly,” said Sikora, who didn’t speak until well into the meeting.
In the meantime, Custer said, Mon Health EMS has an ambulance “roaming” the region in the event of emergencies such as the one that hit in Varner’s house.
And ambulance crews from neighboring Wetzel County and Grant Town, in nearby Marion County, have long picked up calls in western Mon.
Varner, though, wasn’t necessarily reassured by Custer’s talk, she said.
“I just want to know what happens the next time I have to call 911,” she said, after the meeting.
“I just want to know that I can count on ambulance getting here. I don’t think that’s unreasonable.”
Follow The Dominion Post on Twitter@DominionPostWV. Email Jim Bissett: jbissett@dominionpost.com.
