July 23, 2020

Emergency Medical Services and ambulance transport in times of pandemic is anything but business as usual. In fact, COVID 19 has changed many aspects of the way we operate.

Preparation is a key element to success for any business. We have spent years preparing for pandemics, stocking up on vital supplies, educating our providers and executing our emergency action plans.

But as with any best laid plans, there are always things that were not considered. However, we learned to overcome these challenges and adapted to a new way of doing business.

Like many other businesses, safety of our employees is paramount. Very early in the pandemic we creatively found new ways of working from home for much of our vital office staff such as billing, payroll and recruiting. Our Information Technology Department got to work outfitting personal laptops with remote connectivity and software that was needed to work off site. Essential daily communication that was once in person, now was being accomplished with the help of zoom and virtual town hall meetings.

We also moved our in-classroom orientation for new hires to a virtual platform to help with reducing the amount of foot traffic in the building. Physical training was still done as necessary but was changed to small groups wearing masks.
Everyone who works in our buildings had to adapt to doing their jobs while wearing masks, including our mechanics and vehicle support staff.

Communication is a big factor when it comes to managing a widespread pandemic. It is critical to keep our office staff and our providers informed of the current situation. We accomplished this through weekly town hall meetings. This provided our employees with an opportunity to hear the plans in place to keep them and our community safe, and directly ask the COO and Director of Operations any questions they may have.

Equally important was daily communication with the county Emergency Operations Center and our local partners at Fire Departments, medical control, health department, hospitals and nursing homes which were moved to a remote format.

We have met and worked through many challenges since the start of COVID 19. Adjusting schedules to meet the call volume was one issue we had to navigate. With so many citizens in fear of leaving their home and cancelling doctors’ appointments, our call volume was cut significantly. The stay at home orders also reduced call volume in the EMS system. However, we were able to find new ways to maintain work for our providers, knowing it would not be long before our county case load rose, and with that our transports would increase which they have.

In the beginning of the pandemic there were national supply chain shortages for personal protective equipment such as masks. We did have a supply of full-face respirators and infection control suits in our inventory, which we received during the Ebola crisis. We were able to repurpose them for this pandemic to better protect our providers.

Decontamination of our trucks has surpassed our daily cleaning routine. Which is also now a time-consuming task. We were able to create new opportunities for our supply technicians to stage at hospitals and help with this task to improve efficiency. We also partnered with the Dunedin Fire Department to use their specialized sterilization equipment to help sterilize our stretchers and other patient care equipment.

Our Sunstar Leadership and supervisors have worked around the clock to provide comfort and safety for our frontline staff. We have reinvented processes and found new ways to do others.

We are thankful for the outpouring of community support we have received. The donations of food and snacks bring cheer our providers, who are working in isolation suits in the hot Florida sun.

We will make it through this pandemic and will be more resilient because of it. Some things may change back to the way they used to be before COVID 19, but we will adapt to a new normal in our businesses and lives in the areas that need to change for the future.