Bladen County, North Carolina is applying for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s FY 2020 Rural Emergency Medical Services Training Grant, FG-20-005.
Many individuals in Bladen County lack access to primary care and use 9-1-1 and emergency medical services to receive healthcare in non-emergency situations. Alcohol and opioid abuse have only compounded the issue. This creates a tremendous burden for EMS, both for personnel and the system as a whole. Lack of enough qualified paramedics has been a long-standing burden for the county. The current budget does not have the funding needed to pay for the salaries of the staff to obtain continuing or advanced education. This has a negative impact on the department’s ability to support the growth and retention of the staff they do have.
Bladen County is committed to finding alternative ways of providing quality and timely services to those we serve. The goals of this grant are:
• To provide continuing and advanced EMS training to meet the needs of the community.
• Initiate a community paramedic program and through that program,
• Decrease non-emergency calls by 25%
• Decrease behavioral health emergency calls by 25%
Utilizing the community paramedic position, the expectation will be to improve access to appropriate care, reduce repeated transports and readmissions, thus decreasing the daily non-emergent load from EMS. These reductions will ease staffing stresses on the department, decrease response times for other calls while filling a gap and providing coordination of care. EMS responded to almost 9,000 calls in 2019 and over 1,000 were classified as non-emergent.
The Community Paramedic will also collaborate with law enforcement, mobile crisis and the hospital ED to provide follow-up visit/calls to individuals encountered with a mental health crisis and/or substance issue who refused treatment or received naloxone. The Community Paramedic will work to connect all individuals to the appropriate treatment, services and resources
Bladen County is the fourth largest land area in square miles in North Carolina. Spanning 874.33 miles, the county is located in southeastern North Carolina in what is known as the Coastal Plain. The 2020 census is projected as 34,497, according to the North Carolina Office of State Budget and Management. The largest town is Elizabethtown with a population of 3,473; Bladenboro is the next largest with 1,657. Bladen County is one of 56 counties in North Carolina classified as rural with an average population density less than 250 by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget.
In 2018, Bladen County had a higher percentage of poverty at 29.1% than the North Carolina benchmark of 14.1%. The poverty rate for those under the age of 18 was 44.2%, with N.C. at 20.2%. An analysis of the population shows that 61.5% of the Bladen County population identify as white, 33.4% African-American and 9.6% as Hispanic.