Paramedics Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

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

First Responders Form Grassroots Mental Health Support Service

Faced with mounting suicides and PTSD rates, some West Virginia first responders struggling with job-related mental health issues are taking matters into their own hands.

Randy Yohe spoke with Dylan Oliveto, the founder of SCARS Support Services. SCARS stands for “shared compassion and resource services,” an organization to help first responders in times of personal crisis.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Yohe: Dylan, tell me what the philosophy and impetus is behind SCARS.

Oliveto: As many folks have talked about mental health among first responders and frontline workers, it has come to the forefront in the last couple of years, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. We started identifying more and more folks that were suffering from PTSD, and having some mental health problems that went undiagnosed for years. Basically, this was really an idea on a napkin not too awful long ago. We wanted to find a way to help our fellow first responders and until you’ve experienced that, you really don’t realize you need it, and my own personal struggles is where this idea was born.

Yohe: Talk to me a little bit about your personal struggles and how this related to you helping get this organization started.

Oliveto: I’ve been in the business for about 25 years. We don’t realize the stressors that we put on ourselves. I was unfortunate enough to see my first fatal accident at 16 years old. That was clear back in 1996, when I first started. So over the years, you have trauma that continues to build. You go from this traumatic scene, and then the next traumatic scene erases that memory. And so we just have this constant barrage of these memories that keep building up. For me personally, I’ve worked in the fire service, both paid and professional EMS, as an EMT, paramedic, I went on to be a flight paramedic, and a director level manager and operations of EMS organizations. I’ve had the fortune of working for very great organizations, taking care of some really sick patients and some really ugly trauma patients. In 2021, while I was an operations director, I had a paramedic get stabbed on a call, he took five stab wounds, patient became violent, and got out of his seatbelt. And that started to trigger problems. Shortly after that call, I ended up taking care of a lot of our own employees that were really suffering mentally, of seeing that scene and to know that we had a colleague and a friend that, luckily, had non-life threatening injuries. But that result could have been much different with just a few inches of a knife blade. From that call, the rest of the year was just bad call after bad call. My tipping point was a traumatized infant. Through that, it forced me to take a step back and care about my own mental health, but also start researching how to prevent this build up that our first responders see day in and day out.

Yohe: Do first responders around West Virginia get to take a breath between calls, especially between traumatic calls or is it right off to the next one?

Oliveto: It’s hit or miss. I think most first responders would agree that when you have one bad call, you have a string of bad calls. And then you’ll go to times where nothing’s ever routine and you don’t have traumatic experiences. I think almost any first responder you talk to would say, “Oh, yeah, I had a month’s worth of really nasty calls.” I can remember at a very young age, in the Morgantown area, we had several fatal accidents over the span of maybe 30 days, So we just get a buildup. When many of us started, there was no support, other than talking about it, maybe with your partner, but if it bothered you, it was portrayed as a weakness. We had this very much “suck it up” and deal with it, move on to the next call attitude. And that broke a lot of our first responders over the years,

Yohe: We’ve heard that term quite a bit, “suck it up.” Some say that’s an expired term when it comes to first responders, others say no, that there’s still a pervasive “suck it up” attitude throughout the business, which is it?

Oliveto: The unfortunate part is many of our current administrators come from the “suck it up” era. A lot of these folks that come from that timeframe, are in a position where they’re not on the truck as much anymore, they’re not out in the field as much anymore, they’re not working directly in the emergency room anymore, so on and so forth. They don’t have a full grasp of how bad it has gotten out in the field. Not only are we dealing with trauma, but now we’re dealing with a post-pandemic of just call after call after call, we’re dealing with overdose after overdose. The service that is provided by fire and EMS, law enforcement, the volume itself is so taxing that that’s a whole new stressor that a lot of people are not ready to handle.

Yohe: State EMS Director Jody Ratliff said that he is working as hard as he can to put that “suck it up” attitude in the past.

Oliveto: He is. And he’s got a really good backing from the State Medical Director. Our state is very fortunate to now have a director and a medical director who understands the current situation of EMS and the current situations of care providers. And I do believe that he’s working very hard with not only the agencies but at the state and federal level to make sure that there’s funding and resources in place to get our responders to help that they need.

Yohe: I see on your website where SCARS offers a “judgment free zone” and a place “where it’s okay to not be okay.”

Oliveto: That’s kind of become the catchphrase of a lot of our responders throughout the state and actually throughout the country. I’ve been fortunate enough to visit a lot of places where they are very serious about mental health. That kind of slogan is making the newer responders and even the older responders understand that it is okay to not be okay. And it is okay that this trauma does affect you on a daily basis. What we wanted to make sure to try to provide was a space that was safe, where we could allow people to interact with each other, share their stories, share their problems, and not have any fear of being mocked or made to feel like less of a responder or less of a person for allowing these calls to bother them. Because, a normal human being does not have to see what we see.

Yohe: You’ve got your organization SCARS in Harrison County. I know over in Huntington, they’ve got COMPASS, which is similar. How vital is it right now that the state’s plans for getting a statewide program to help first responders with their mental health be implemented?

Oliveto: Next to funding, it should be next on their list. We’re losing first responders by the hundreds. Without any funding, we’re not going to keep our squads alive. Without any funding, we can’t address the mental health issue. Funding’s got to be number one on the agenda. Then number two is our mental health. I think a big initiative for the state to do is figure out how to have an EMS worker recertify every two years or every four years, part of that needs to be some kind of a mental health check. It should be no different than getting your yearly checkup at your doctor’s office, to make sure you’re okay and at an organizational level, to make sure that there are resources in place to help mitigate mental health struggles within the community of the first responders.

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

Stemming The EMT Mental Health Crisis With Communication

With statewide Emergency Medical Service worker numbers still down a third, there’s plenty of overtime for those often making life and death ambulance runs. With all that OT, there’s overwhelming stress — and a dire need for more mental health support.

With statewide Emergency Medical Service worker numbers still down a third, there’s plenty of overtime for those often making life and death ambulance runs.

With all that OT, there’s overwhelming stress — and a dire need for more mental health support.

Bridgeport Director of Emergency Management Tim Curry recently wrote an article in the National Journal of Emergency Medical Services entitled, Suck it up Culture is Killing First Responders. He wrote that he had answered a call like a hundred others, but one was about an interstate wreck that killed a young girl.

“I was looking through her phone and seeing the text from her mom, saying, ‘Hey, why aren’t you home yet? Where are you at? I’m worried,’” Curry said. “That hit me really hard. I had seen things that were way worse than that up to that point, but that was the point I got to where it was too much. I had to step away.”

The incident of post-traumatic stress overwhelmed the veteran EMT. Curry said he turned to alcohol, forsaking the longstanding “suck it up” first responder mantra, before realizing he needed help.

“Realizing that this is not normal and that I needed to talk to somebody was a hard journey for somebody that’s always been, ‘I’m okay, I’m tough, I can handle it, I don’t need any help,’” Curry said. “I looked in the mirror and said, ‘I need to deal with this.’ It was a long journey to get here.”

Nationally, more than 100 first responders committed suicide in 2021, more than died in the line of duty. West Virginia has lost more than 1,900 EMTs over the past three years to retirement and simply leaving the job. While recruitment and retainment efforts are ongoing, Curry said his overworked colleagues need more mental health support and outlets to deal with the trauma.

“They need to know that it’s okay to need to take a break, and it’s okay to not be okay and to talk about it with somebody. They need to have healthy coping mechanisms, good diet, exercise, hobbies, things that are outlets for your stress from the workplace,” Curry said. “Go and do something, whatever it is, play golf, go skiing, go hiking, whatever it is to blow off that steam in a healthy way.”

West Virginia Emergency Medical Director Jody Ratliff takes personal calls from traumatized first responders needing to talk to someone who knows the feeling. He said more mental health support is paramount to leaving the “suck it up” mentality behind — while moving forward.

“If we talk about retention and keeping folks in EMS and first responders across the board, if we’re going to talk about retention, mental health is a huge issue that we’ve just never spoken about,” Ratliff said. “It affects you over time, it affects your physical ability, your mental ability, and then people want to leave the business because they just can’t handle it anymore.”

Ratliff said he is looking at West Virginia adopting an EMS mental health support program and an app now seeing success in Florida.

“First responders across the state can go into this app, and they plug in some things on how they’re feeling that day, or something that might have just happened,” Ratliff said. “It might say to reach out to someone in the next few days, or it might put you in contact with a mental health professional right then and there.”

Curry calls setting up a mental health support app is an excellent first step.

“The fact that people are waking up to this and doing something about it now speaks volumes to where we’re at versus where we’ve been. We’re seeing the effects of long-term burnout and long-term issues dealing with everything that first responders see, and we’re facing a massive paramedic shortage now, because we neglected this problem for a long time,” Curry said. “There needs to be better access to get good mental health care covered by your insurance. These agencies need to do a better job of saying we’re going to cover this, we’re going to even employ somebody and help in-house, which is what the city of Huntington is doing.”

Ratliff said he’s working with EMS directors across the state to get the “suck it up” monkey off of everybody’s back.

“It’s okay to talk about the stigma, it’s time for the stigma to go away. We all deal with this, whether we want to admit it or not. It’s something that we’ve all dealt with in our careers,” Ratliff said. “I speak very publicly about me dealing with my own trauma during my career, and getting help and what it meant to me and my career and my life.”

Curry said a quarter of West Virginia EMS workers report mental health issues and those are only the ones who admit it. He said it is past time to go from “suck it up,” to stand up — and deal with the issues.

Mobile Training Ambulances To Address Growing W.Va. EMT and Paramedic Shortage

A legislative plan is taking action to help counter the statewide shortage of EMTs and paramedics.

Over the past three years, West Virginia has lost more than 1,900 EMTs and paramedics. It’s a workforce that’s short by nearly a third.

Del. Clay Riley, R-Harrison County, said the time and cost of first responder training turns many away from the job.

Gov. Jim Justice dedicated $10 million in American Rescue Plan funding to address the problems.

Beginning this fall, Riley said the state will use those funds to provide five mobile certification ambulances to travel the state offering free training and testing

“They will be able to travel to their location, whether it’s Grant County or Jefferson County or Ohio County, and be able to give them that practical hands-on training that they need in order to get certified,” Riley said.

Riley said rural counties often respond to more auto accidents than structure fires, so first responder training will be tailored to a community’s specific needs.

He said some counties are finding recruiting success by using Rescue Plan funds to set up a free first responder training program, offering uniforms, books and supplies while covering certification testing fees.

Riley said West Virginia needs to offer a competitive first responder pay scale to recruit and retain EMTs and paramedics. Counties help fund their programs in different ways, using service fees, levies or insurance billing. o.

He said all 55 West Virginia counties don’t need the same funding devices, but they should all have some sort of income plan to supplement first responder pay.

Training for Wounds: National Guard Medics Recertify

The West Virginia National Guard’s Medical Detachment conducted their annual recertification for army medics this morning at the Center for National Readiness Memorial Tunnel.

In addition to a written test, the medics were required to complete seven training exercises, which varied from attending to victims of a car crash to evacuating soldiers from combat. 32 medics, four of them women, participated in the training.

The scenarios were held in the CNR Memorial Tunnel halfway between Charleston and Beckley on the West Virginia Turnpike. Training activities increased in intensity the farther into the tunnel the medics traveled and were designed to simulate the range of situations an army medic might expect to encounter in either a domestic or foreign crisis.

National Guard medics participate in the training once a year.

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from the Benedum Foundation.