Crews from Warren County Ambulance District’s four bases responded to almost 300 more calls in 2019 than the year before, and Chief Tim Flake doesn’t expect that number to slow down.

Flake told The Record that district personnel responded to over 4,400 calls for service in 2019, an average of about 12 to 13 per day. A small number of calls were for routine transfers from care facility to hospital appointments, but that vast majority were 911 calls, Flake said.

There was no single reason calls went up, Flake said. It was just a busy year. And the ambulance chief predicts each year will just keep getting busier.

“Populations in our district are slowly on the rise. We’ve seen it in Warrenton and Wright City,” Flake explained. “(And) we’re right on I-70. Population flows through our community on a daily basis. We get several patients from out of town, people who are just visiting, or they’re stopping to get gas and they have an issue.”

“I think geographically, where we’re positioned, and the economy being what it is, and people building and moving here, I expect (calls) to continue to go up,” Flake concluded.

One potential improvement among the 2019 call numbers: The ambulance district administered fewer doses of Narcan, a drug that reverses opioid overdoses.

Flake said medics administered Narcan 74 times in 2019. The highest number of doses in one year was 148 in 2016.

There are several possible explanations, but Flake said the decrease is likely because other emergency agencies are carrying and administering their own Narcan, and because the treatment drug is now available at pharmacies.

Flake said the ambulance district currently responds to about one overdose call per day, but some of those are people who accidentally take too much medication or other incidents.

In terms of overall numbers, he estimated about 40-50 percent of ambulance calls are for medical issues, and another 25 percent are for injuries.

With the rising number of emergency calls, Flake said there are times when  the ambulance district’s four regular crews are all dispatched at the same time, with none left on standby. Hospital runs are particularly challenging at these times, usually taking an hour round-trip.

At these times, Flake said the ambulance district has several backup options. There are extra ambulances at the district headquarters in Warrenton that can be staffed by administrators during weekday business hours.

Overnight and on weekends, the county dispatch center might contact off-duty staff to volunteer for a fifth or sixth crew when the four on-duty crews are deployed. Or, failing that, the district contacts neighboring agencies to have a mutual aid ambulance on standby in Warren County.

“In 2019, Warren County Ambulance District requested mutual aid 22 times ... and we only actually had to say, ‘Hey, we’ve got an actual patient,’ one time in 2019,” Flake commented. 

Warren County Ambulance District currently staffs 44 full- and part-time employees, including three non-medical staff, and is hiring three more part-time medics.

Flake said he believes the district can continue to handle growing call volumes for a time without a significant staff increase. If the district’s 12 calls a day start pushing 20 calls a day, he said the district might consider adding another crew. That would mean another two medics on staff each shift, a total of six additional staff.