A Humboldt ambulance in November 2022. (John Hult/South Dakota Searchlight)
Motorized cots and chairs, emergency medical technician training and life support dummies are among the purchases made by local ambulance services through two rounds of grant awards from the South Dakota Department of Health.
Some of those items came up during the first meeting of the Legislature’s Emergency Medical Services Interim Committee this week in Pierre. That body is studying ways to maintain the viability of the state’s ambulance services, which operate without state funding through a hodgepodge of paid, paid-per-call and volunteer frameworks.
The $7.5 million in grants for local agencies originated with federal COVID relief funding. Former Gov. Kristi Noem asked lawmakers to set aside $20 million of that money in 2022 to bolster local ambulance services.
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The money came in three phases. The first $1.7 million was used to fund Telemedicine in Motion, which uses electronic tablets in ambulance vehicles to connect paramedics and other mobile medical providers to doctors who can help guide their responses.
In the second phase, the state purchased and distributed LIFEPAK 15 patient monitors and defibrillators, along with training for their use, at a cost of $11.6 million.
The third step involved $7.5 million in grants to individual ambulance providers. Those were made available after the completion of a statewide assessment of sustainability for emergency medical services, paid for during the second funding phase. To apply, applicants were required to read the assessment and ask for items that could fill the gaps identified by the report.
“We said, ‘If you want to apply for a grant, you have to be able to read the study, to read what was done statewide,” Marty Link, the Health Department’s director of emergency medical services, told the committee on Monday. “We didn’t want that just sitting on the shelf.”
Equipment, training purchased through grant awards
Among other things, the sustainability report cited recruitment and retention, an aging volunteer base and funding for equipment as major needs.
To that end, dozens of local agencies applied for grants to purchase motorized “power cots” and stair chairs, which allow medics to transfer patients without the physical strain.
Fifteen of the 44 grants in round one, awarded in July 2024, included one or more power cots and chairs, distributed across 14 communities. Some of those grants also included money for instructor training, training classes, medical simulation mannequins and software.
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Another 18 of the round two grants awarded last November involved the purchase of mobile people-movers.
“With an aging workforce and patients who are getting larger and larger, it helps us get people safely in and out of the house,” said Alan Perry, who heads up the ambulance service in Lennox and is the president of the South Dakota Emergency Medical Services Association.
Perry’s agency bought one power cot and one stair chair with a $45,000 grant, awarded last July. The agency got another $25,200 in the second round to produce a strategic planning report for Lennox, and to buy bright, wearable lights for use by those who respond to incidents on highways at night.
Training was also a focus area. In Spink County, the ambulance service was able to hire two emergency medical technicians and put on a training course for other technician hopefuls. Twelve of the 17 people who qualified to take the national exam passed and were certified, according to the Department of Health’s presentation to lawmakers on Monday.
Grant money for patient transfer database
The largest single grant went to the South Dakota Association of Health Care Organizations for a project that aims to boost efficiencies statewide.
The group is using its $500,000 grant to set up an interfacility transfer system that it hopes will create “a single portal where neighboring ambulance services can view and select available transfers” by November 2026.
Link pointed to that project during the study committee’s first meeting.
Ambulances that move patients without emergency needs from one facility to another – like a patient who needs to ride from a nursing home in Chamberlain to an orthopedic hospital in Sioux Falls – can create hazards for their own communities by doing so, he said.
“There’s a lot of concern with ‘How do we maintain that ambulance presence within our local community when we have an ambulance going over the road?” Link said.
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As a result, local ambulance services may decline to give the ride or ask that the patient wait for a ride, according to Tim Rave, director of the association. On any given day, Rave told South Dakota Searchlight, there are up to 80 people in the state who are in a hospital that ought to be somewhere else.
That’s the kind of information the association’s collected with its grant funding, Rave said, as it looks to find out how prevalent the issue is. The database the association aims to build would make it easier to alert ambulance services in any given area to patients in need of a ride, Rave said.
In the future, he said, such a database could help ambulances do things like pick up patients from the hospital to which they’ve just delivered a different patient and bring them home.
That would allow a service to “get paid both ways.”
“That’s the sweet spot we’d love to get to, but that feels a little bit like a stretch goal at this point,” Rave said.
