White River and Seals Ambulance Service

REPORTER EDITORIAL

White River Township residents have been served by Seals Ambulance Services since May 1, 2018. Seals emergency service has become a very divisive topic, and there is a great deal of misinformation about both why White River chose Seals and how well or poorly residents are being served. The Reporter would like to give our readers some accurate information to consider.

Many people say White River fired Cicero and hired Seals.

That is half-true. They did hire Seals.

In December 2017, The Reporter published a short article entitled, “White River Township to lose Cicero medics, ambulance service.” We reported that the Cicero Town Council had unanimously voted against extending the agreement for providing Advanced Life Support (ALS) services to White River Township because members of the council felt that continuing to provide these services was placing too great of a financial and logistical strain on the Cicero Fire Department.

This change did not happen overnight, and the Cicero Fire Department gave White River 180 days to get another ALS provider in place.

As of May 1, that provider is Seals Ambulance Service, which is based in Indianapolis.

Two points here are important: White River did not fire Cicero as their ALS provider, and Cicero did not leave White River with no service.

Another fact to consider is that Cicero is 2.12 square miles and has a population of 4,812 as of the 2010 census.

Adding White River’s population of 2,486 residents may not be a huge burden, but Cicero said they believed adding White River’s 56.07 square miles to the coverage area was simply too much for a small but growing town’s fire department to handle.

According to a press release from March of this year, Seals signed a contract with White River, “to provide emergency ambulance services for all 911 calls within the township limits.”

And that is where this gets controversial: “Emergency ambulance services for all 911 calls within the township limits” (emphasis added).

Seals is not in-service 100 percent of the time. To be fair, no ambulance is in-service 100 percent of the time, and that is why communities have “mutual aid agreements,” and why your 911 dispatch center has to have accurate information about which units are in-service, out-of-service, or on-call at any given moment.

Sources have told The Reporter that Seals is only in-service 20 to 24 percent of the time.

That is almost exactly half-true. Seals was in-service 48 percent of the time in April 2018.

The Reporter has the Seals unit status report for April, the first month it began serving White River Township. There were 720 hours in April. Seals was out-of-service for 373 hours that month, including 14 hours on April 1. It went out-of-service at 7:02 a.m. for “manpower” and came back at 9:10 p.m.

The Reporter is not saying 48 percent in-service time is an acceptable number.

It is not.

But it is a far cry from 20 percent.

While we cannot speak for the hours of service in May or June, the numbers would have to be substantially worse to bring them down to 20 percent.

More rumors abound

In an article published July 18 entitled, “Paramedic arrested for Fentanyl theft,” we explained that a Fishers man, Jason Howard, who worked as a paramedic for Seals was arrested and booked into the Hancock County Jail.

There is a fair bit of talk about this possibly including White River ambulances. That is not a known fact at this time.

Seals serves several counties in Indiana in various capacities, and currently there are no charges filed in Hamilton County. Thus, there is no way to know if any of over 30 vials of Fentanyl were from White River Township.

Another incident that has come to our attention is a 911 call on July 4 to Hobbes Road in which Seals did not respond, but Jackson Township Fire Department did. Details on that incident are available in the article entitled “Jackson Township answers White River call for help” and in a letter to the editor in the July 22, 2018 edition of The Reporter.

The Reporter likes to stick to facts that are checked with reliable sources. We hope our readers will do the same.

Final thoughts

While Seals ambulance is not doing as well as residents want, they are also not doing nearly as poorly as some believe.

White River Township has a small population relative to southern Hamilton County, and thus it has a small tax base from which to draw. It chose to hire Seals because it needed to provide its own emergency services and because Seals fit the budget. The elected officials in White River Township were trying to serve their citizens as best they could with the resources available.

Are White River residents correct that they deserve better? Absolutely.

Are White River elected officials deliberately under-serving you? Absolutely not.

Your complaint should be about Seals. It is that company which is failing to “provide emergency ambulance services for all 911 calls within the township limits.”

The decision to hire Seals looks great on paper. It is an established company and is part of a national family of companies called Priority Ambulance. It contracts for ambulance service with Ruoff Home Mortgage Music Center, the Indiana State Fairgrounds and Event Center and Indiana Downs Horse Track, and it is the preferred provider for Community Health Network. It has over 50 ambulances available in Indiana.

But Seals was only in-service 48 percent of the time in April.

The Reporter hopes White River Township is looking into other ambulance service options.

Perhaps, when negotiating with White River Township, Seals Ambulance Services sold the sizzle instead of the steak.