Jody Ratliff Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Emergency Medical Services Staffing Continuing Positive Turnaround

Ratliff said local EMS squads are excited about the ability to bill insurance patients for emergency care that doesn’t include transports. The legislature passed that law in the general session earlier this year.

Just three years ago, EMS provider numbers across the state were down a third. At that time, more than 3,000 staffers were needed..

In November 2023, state EMS Director Jody Ratliff told WVPB increased recruitment and retention efforts helped gain 600 providers over the past year. On Tuesday, Ratliff told the interim Joint Committee on Volunteer Fire Department and Emergency Medical Services he expects to see more gains when the numbers are released in May.

Ratliff said two years into the EMS Leadership classes conducted in partnership with University of Charleston, the instruction is invaluable. He said the gains have come in promoting rural EMTs and paramedics who are great health care providers but lack the needed business expertise.

“This class is that Director 101,” Ratliff said. “That teaches about budgets, about everything HR, everything that you need to know, that base that you need to actually be a director.”

Among recent EMS advancements, Ratliff said the state is ready to sign the contract for “Hospital Hub” software that will greatly improve patient charting originating in the ambulance.

“In the past, we’ve had to submit our chart to the hospital, once we got them there, fax it to them, mail it to them, depending on what era it was, how we got it there,” Ratliff said. “The Hospital Hub is in real time. As that chart comes through our system, it’ll immediately be sent to the hospital that the patient is going to. That’s a permanent record that will automatically go to the hospital and that chart can actually flow right into the hospital’s chart. So all that permanent record stays with them.”

Ratliff told the committee he expects to see a number of positives from the upcoming Emergency Medical Services Pediatric Symposium. It will be held at the Summit Bechtel Reserve in Fayette County Sept. 29 through Oct. 2.

“It’s free education,” Ratliff said. “It’s the first multi-day pediatric symposium we’ve had in the state. We’ve got instructors coming in from Shriners Children’s National Hospital, Florida Pediatrics and the University of Kentucky. There is going to be trauma and respiratory specialties for children, snake bites, burns, better ingestion, pediatric abuse, head trauma, shock. And the Boy Scout camp is allowing us to use their facilities.”

Ratliff said local EMS squads are excited about the ability to bill insurance patients for emergency care that doesn’t include transport. The legislature passed that law in the general session earlier this year.

“The protocols are ready, and they will be rolling out this week,” Ratliff said. “And they’re champing at the bit to get a hold of them.”

Del. Joe Statler, R-Monongalia, requested the committee push for additional state EMS funding in the expected upcoming special session.

“I’m an advocate that we do have to do some type of state funding that would be in conjunction with the counties where the services are needed out there,” Statler said.

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HOST: West Virginia’s long depleted Emergency Medical Services staffing continues a positive turnaround. Randy Yohe has more.

Randy: Just three years ago, EMS provider numbers across the state were down a third, from a total need of more than 3,000.

State EMS Director Jody Ratliff has said increased recruitment and retention efforts helped gain 600 providers last year. He told the interim Joint Committee on Volunteer Fire Department and EMS Tuesday there is another annual net positive employment gain so far in 2024.

Ratliff said the EMS leadership classes at the University of Charleston are invaluable in promoting rural EMTs and paramedics who are great health care providers, but lack the needed business expertise.

Ratliff bite: 21:24 “This class is that director 101, that teaches about budgets, about everything HR, everything that you need to know, that base that you need to actually be a director.”

Del. Joe Statler, a Republican from Monongalia County, requested the committee push for additional state EMS funding in the expected upcoming special session.

State EMS Director Tackling Recruitment, First Responder Mental Health Challenges

The dire shortage of EMTs and paramedics across West Virginia is now trending in a positive direction, but there is still much to be done to remedy what many call a first responder mental health crisis.

Randy Yohe spoke with Jody Ratliff, director of the state Office of Emergency Medical Services, on meeting the challenges facing those who come to our aid when we need help the most.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Yohe: Director Ratliff, where do things stand? What are the telling numbers right now regarding EMS vacancies, statewide?

Ratliff: Statewide, we’re still down. We look at it this way, over the past 11 years, we’ve lost. Over the past year, we have gained around 600 providers. That’s a huge plus that we’ve turned everything around in the right direction. But the question is, people aren’t really seeing those numbers. When you lose for 11 years, one positive year doesn’t equate to 11. So we’re still low, for sure, but we are heading in the right direction.

Yohe: You were, not too long ago, down a third of your staff. It’s not that anymore, is it?

Ratliff: Not a third, but we’re not far from a third either. We’re still pretty far down. We still need to add more EMTs and paramedics, for sure.

Yohe: What else are you doing for recruitment and retention?

Ratliff: Senate Bill 737 came out. That was for EMS enhancement funding and we’re still working with that right now. We just sent a letter out to the county commissioners on how they can spend that money. It’s basically that monies be able to be spent for an enhancement on payroll. For a provider, they’re going to see, I’ll use the term bonus, above and beyond what they would normally get paid.

Yohe: What are the key challenges your department faces, and what is underway or planned to meet these challenges?

Ratliff: We have a lot of challenges. The state medical director is working on rewriting protocols, updating protocols, or reformatting protocols. Somewhere around June 2024, if not before, we’re going to have a whole new EMS system with all new protocols. They’re going to have more medications, we’re doing away with some of the older medications. We’re gonna allow paramedics to be paramedics and EMTs to be EMTs in the state.

Yohe: What are the benefits to the protocol changes?

Ratliff: The benefits are implementing more modern medicine. We’re getting away from the old stuff that we’ve been doing for years and years and years. It’s outdated. We know it just doesn’t work the way it should. So that’s a benefit to the patients.

Yohe: You had some first responder mental health care initiatives on the drawing board. Some of them may have kicked off to help handle what many responders, and now some legislators, are calling a mental health crisis. Where do the state support and response team projects stand?

Ratliff: That’s a great question. So right now, with Senate Bill 737, 90 percent of it went to enhancement of the funding and 10 percent of it goes to mental health. Each county got $18,800 some odd dollars, and they were able to develop a response team.

If, in that EMS region, an agency has a bad call, and they need that debriefing for their mental health, we’re going to have a response team to come out and be able to do that.

Yohe: Does that also include proactive or preventive care before mental health issues come up for first responders?

Ratliff: That’s the other thing we’re looking at. We’re trying to gather some data. Hopefully we start that in 2024, to be able to get some data so we can do preventative care for first responders. We want to be able to get that data handed over to the EMS coalition so they can start to decipher it and then start figuring out what we need to do to be preventive, not just long-term. Then we get preventative, we get in the moment, and we get long-term. That way we start covering mental health across the board.

Yohe: In the moment care, with that dividing up of $18,000 plus to each county, is there actually a response team available if there’s a real critical trauma incident and some of the first responders need some counseling right then and there?

Ratliff: Right now we do have some folks around the state. I wouldn’t say it’s a critical response team. We’ve just got some areas around the state, some agencies, if you will, handle situations like that. We want to be able to develop those response teams. So EMS, fire and law enforcement are helping EMS, fire law enforcement. There’s no better health and people who do it themselves.

Yohe: Is there a particular mental health training for EMTs? Is talking about mental health and trying to understand things as an incoming EMT involved in the training?

Ratliff: I’m glad you asked that because it will be. We’ve already got plans that if when you come in to EMS with an EMT class, paramedic class, or a critical care class, every time that you go into one of those classes, we’re going to have it set up hopefully, in 2024, that you’ll get about 10 slides about mental health. Not just your own mental health, but also who you can call, how to get a hold of people, things like that. We want from the start of your career, all the way to the top of your career, we want you to see that every single time that you take a class.

Issues With Weedkiller Round Up And W.Va.’s EMT Shortage Is Improving, This West Virginia Morning

On this West Virginia Morning, the dire shortage of EMT’s and paramedics across West Virginia is now trending in a positive direction. Randy Yohe spoke with Jody Ratliff, director of the State Office of Emergency Medical Services, on meeting the challenges facing those who come to our aid.

On this West Virginia Morning, the dire shortage of EMT’s and paramedics across West Virginia is now trending in a positive direction. But there is still much to be done to remedy what many call a first responder mental health crisis.

Randy Yohe spoke with Jody Ratliff, director of the State Office of Emergency Medical Services, on meeting the challenges facing those who come to our aid when we need help the most.

Also, in this show, we listen to the latest story from The Allegheny Front – a public radio program based in Pittsburgh that reports on environmental issues in the region. Their latest story looks at Monsanto and problems with the weedkiller Round Up.

West Virginia Morning is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting which is solely responsible for its content.

Support for our news bureaus comes from Shepherd University.

Eric Douglas produced this episode.

Listen to West Virginia Morning weekdays at 7:43 a.m. on WVPB Radio or subscribe to the podcast and never miss an episode. #WVMorning

State EMS Director Tackling Mental Health Issues Head-On

Randy Yohe spoke with state Emergency Medical Director Jody Ratliff on what’s being done to relieve the mental anguish first responders face on the job.

The job stress and trauma for our first responders too often becomes both overwhelming and internalized.

Randy Yohe spoke with state Emergency Medical Director Jody Ratliff on what’s being done to relieve the mental anguish these frontliners face on the job.

This story has been lightly edited for clarity.

Yohe: Tell us about the impact of the early morning personal calls that you periodically get from EMTs and paramedics across the state that had a traumatic night at work.

Ratliff: When I get these phone calls, they could be early morning, could be in the middle of day while I’m at work, or it could even be at nighttime. Usually it starts with, hey, I want to run something by you. And they usually run the call by me to see if I felt like they did everything they could have to help the patient. And from there, it kind of turns into, “So, it kind of bothered me, this call bothered me, can we talk about it?”

For example, whenever I did give the speech at the legislative interims, two days later, my boss from years ago, Kelly Crozier, called me, and she told me she heard about it. Kelly is very tough and rough and kind of cold-hearted, nothing gets to her. She calls me and says, “God, I cried.” I broke down on that one because it was so true, and that really hit home with me to know that what I said affected someone who was such an influence in my life and my career.

Yohe: Here in 2023, talk about the “suck it up” mentality being a thing of the past. And, how pervasive are the mental health challenges these days for first responders?

Ratliff: It’s not what it was. When I was brought up, it was that “suck it up” mentality, we’ve got to move on to the next call. Unfortunately, that’s still EMS, we still have another call that’s coming, we don’t know when it’s going to stop for the shift. What we don’t want to do is put these young ones in the same shoes that we were in, we don’t want them to suck it up. We don’t want them to walk away from it, say okay, I’ll tuck it away and then we don’t have to deal with it anymore. That just doesn’t work.

When you tuck it away, it’s going to come out in the worst possible way that you can think of. Instead, we want them talking about it, we want them to come to those older paramedics, those older EMTs and get it out of their system, because otherwise it comes out in the most horrible ways you can think of.

Yohe: I heard a new term recently I hadn’t heard before – compassion fatigue. Talk to me about that.

Ratliff: Compassion fatigue is not something that we speak about a whole lot. When you see so many things, and you deal with so many things, you kind of get hardened. I don’t want to say it’s hard to feel compassion, but you’ve almost got to tuck it away. When you’re dealing with a parent whose child has died, and you have to tell them that their child has died, as much as you want to feel compassion for that you still have to maintain, because you have a job to do. It’s rough to maintain that level of compassion on everything that you do on a daily basis, because there’s only so many emotions that you can get out at a time. Whenever you see it on a daily basis, I can tell you it’s difficult to feel emotions, after 23 years of seeing the things that we see.

Yohe: And so that can swell up inside of you and become a ticking time bomb, right?

Ratliff: Exactly. That goes right back to what I was talking about. If you don’t get it out, it always comes down in the most horrible ways you can think of.

Yohe: One program you’ve instituted is the 988 Crisis Lifeline. So how does that work for EMTs? And how does it help?

Ratliff: 988 was developed by Lata Menon, the CEO at First Choice Services. It’s been in the state for a while and we just attached ourselves to it. We went up and met with Lata, and she jumped on board, and we jumped on board. We convinced her to let some of her folks do ride-alongs with EMS so they could get an idea of what we go through and what we see.

What we’ve got now is if you’re having a little bit of a mental health crisis, or you had that bad night at work, you just need to talk to someone, you can call that 988 Crisis Lifeline and you’re gonna have someone on the line that can help talk to you and maybe talk you off the edge. He’ll call me whatever the case might be. We just kind of got into the EMS part of it, we’re going to get it with fire and law enforcement also.

Yohe: You are also developing regional critical debriefing teams. What exactly do they do? And how are they in action?

Ratliff: Whenever it’s all said and done, we hope they’re made up of EMS, law enforcement and fire, and then a mental health specialist. If they have that big scene out there, and it’s traumatic and it’s bothering people, it’s right then and there is when they need to have that debriefing. That’s when they can make that phone call to the regional team. They load up, they come out, they sit down with them, they go through the process, whether it be crying with them or whatever the case might be.

Yohe: What are your plans and hopes for how this will develop?

Ratliff: My hope is, once we get everything in place, as far as the money and get people trained, and things like that, that people will use it. We can do everything that we can do, but if it’s not being used, then it’s pretty much for nothing. So we are really pushing this hard in the EMS world. We’re hoping to push in the fire world, we’re hoping to push in the law enforcement world – so everybody takes advantage of it.

My other hope is that the older medics out there have to be the leaders in mental health. It’s not just the directors, it’s not just a supervisor. It’s those 20, 30 and 35 year medics out there. They’re the ones who have to be the leaders and get the young ones talking about mental health and encourage them to speak about the problems and not keep it in.

Yohe: There’s still a shortage of EMTs statewide. Talk about the risks and rewards associated with the job.

Ratliff: Unfortunately, there are risks. I believe it’s within three years of being hired that you’re going to be assaulted in EMS, for not the best pay. Those are the risks, the mental health risks. The reward of the job is, you’ve got to experience it. I wish I could sit and describe it, but the truth of the matter is, after 23 years, I love EMS. I’ve given my life to EMS. I know it. I love it. And I can’t imagine doing anything else in life.

First Responders’ Mental Health Needs And Reintroducing Chestnut Trees, This West Virginia Morning

On this West Virginia Morning, May is mental health awareness month. Randy Yohe speaks with state Emergency Medical Director Jody Ratliff on what’s being done to relieve the mental anguish first responders face on the job.

On this West Virginia Morning, May is mental health awareness month, both nationally and statewide. The job stress and trauma for first responders, especially paramedics and EMTs, too often becomes overwhelming and internalized. Randy Yohe speaks with state Emergency Medical Director Jody Ratliff on what’s being done to relieve the mental anguish these front liners face on the job.

Also, in this show, a graduate student’s project at Shepherd University looks to help reintroduce chestnut trees to the Appalachian region. Shepherd Snyder has the story.

West Virginia Morning is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting which is solely responsible for its content.

Support for our news bureaus comes from Concord University and Shepherd University.

Caroline MacGregor is our assistant news director and produced this episode.

Chuck Anziulewicz hosted this episode.

Listen to West Virginia Morning weekdays at 7:43 a.m. on WVPB Radio or subscribe to the podcast and never miss an episode. #WVMorning