The state penitentiary at Parchman is once again in the hot seat for keeping the county’s ambulance service on lockdown.
According to statements made by MedStat Director David Eldridge and Sunflower County Emergency Management Director Ben Grant, the prison is excessively calling on the emergency medical service provider for a number of non-emergency transports.
At least 25 of the 50 calls for service to the prison this year have taken place within the last three months and have been non-emergency calls that could have been handled by means other than a 911 vehicle.
Many of the cases required MedStat to simply transport prison inmates to a hospital away from the prison and outside of Sunflower County.
Eldridge said although MedStat has had a few emergency calls at the prison, most of them are just “running around.”
To further establish his point, Eldridge said, “This morning we had a call for just a transport. They wanted him taken all of the way to Aberdeen, where he’s from, just take him home, more or less.”
He said it was a patient that they’ve actually discharged and released from prison, but he is an invalid.
In addition, Grant added that even though the prison has a hospital and ambulances, they are still calling MedStat to transport patients to other hospitals.
“They’re steadily going to Greenwood, Clarksdale and Greenville,” Grant added. He said on one call, the prisoner had already been transported when MedStat arrived, but no one called to cancel the request.
A number of the call-outs were to take prisoners to a hospital in Coahoma County, and Attorney Johnny McWilliams ask why the Coahoma County emergency service provider was not used, and Eldridge explained that the prison was calling 911 and not the emergency service provider directly, so that systematically routes the calls to MedStat.
Several points arose with regard to the complaint.
Foremost was the consensus that the prison’s ambulances were not operational.
The derived deduction was that money needs to be allocated from the state to get the prison’s ambulances up and running. McWilliams said, “The biggest help we can get is from our own local legislators.”
The county does not have to pay for the transport services from Parchman. The penitentiary handles that.
“The problem is taking an ambulance out of Sunflower County, if we have an emergency we want an ambulance for it.”
Eldridge surmised that many of the prison’s transports do not require an ambulance. He said they just need a medical transport and a van would suffice. He said he has also met with Parchman hospital officials about alternative methods of handling “super critical patients.”
And he added, “So hopefully we are deterring that a little bit.”
The concern first surfaced in February 2017 and was again mentioned in open session in September of that year when then District 31 Representative Sara Richardson-Thomas visited the county lawmakers to ask what they needed of her.
During that session the county supervisors told Richardson-Thomas that North Sunflower Medical Center in Ruleville was reporting slow service response times from MedStat because of the number of call-outs from the state prison facility. McWilliams and the lawmakers told her that responding to calls from the prison was taking away from the ambulance services designed for Sunflower County citizens.
It was previously established that the emergency medical response team was legally obligated to respond to calls for medical care and transport from the prison because their contract defines their service area as "the entirety of the geographic area of Sunflower County."
Richardson-Thomas told them then to submit their priorities to her in writing so that she could make sure it was presented to the legislature as an official request and given to the correct subcommittee. The information had to be put in bill form before it was presented, then it could be given to the full committee before being handed down to the floor.
McWilliams said on Monday that the county lawmakers will have to do everything they did before, which was “write everybody whose got anything to do with it,” he said, “We’ve got a problem and somebody needs to take it off of us, it’s not Sunflower County’s problem, it’s a State of Mississippi problem.”
In other business,
The county supervisors opened and took under advisement sealed bids for supplying the county with culverts. McWilliams received responses from three companies. However, only two suppliers actually submitted dollar amounts.
In lieu of a quoted price, Tri-State Culverts submitted a statement that read, “We believe in fair and honest bids and do not play these political games.” McWilliams said that statement is considered a “no bid.”
The lowest bid of $76,952.10 came from Southern Pipe and Supply of Ridgeland. GNO Supply of Tupelo submitted a price of $77,920.68.
In executive session, the county decision-makers voted to hire Attorney Neysha Sanders as one of the county’s public defenders to replace Attorney Debra Giles, who was successfully elected to the district’s Chancery Judge’s seat during the November election and will take office Jan. 1.