The Excelsior Springs City Council voted 5-0 on Monday night, Oct. 5, to purchase a regular ambulance rather than a larger one designed for bariatric patients—but they found middle ground in trying to address the needs of local residents of all sizes and weights.
In September, when Fire Chief Paul Tribble requested more than $160,000 in Public Safety Sales Tax funds to buy a new ambulance to replace the 2008 model currently in use, an impassioned plea by the manager of an apartment building for older adults gave them some pause.
Sandy Ganzer, who manages the Oaks Apartments, said she knew of some larger patients in town who would benefit from a specially-designed bariatric ambulance and cot rather than the regular-sized ambulance under consideration.
At that time, members of the council asked Tribble to look into the costs of the bariatric equipment, to give them more information as they made their decision. On Monday night, Tribble brought back not only a price tag, but also a cost/benefit analysis.
He said that five and a half years of statistics collected by the fire department’s software showed that while there was a need, only a tiny percentage of the community’s residents would require a bariatric cot and ambulance for transportation.
He admitted that there is no hard-and-fast basis that defines “bariatric”—that it’s more than just weight. Height, age, health and other details factor in when deciding whether a patient requires a larger cot and/or ambulance.
But going back to February 2010, Tribble determined that over those five and half years, the ambulance had been called out for 12,291 patients. Information about the patient is gathered for every call, whether the patient is transported or not, and part of that information is weight—often provided by the patient, occasionally by medical records if the patient is being transferred from one facility to another and sometimes the paramedics guess at the weight if the patient doesn’t know or can’t answer.
Of those 12,291 patients, nearly all of them—12,216, or about 99.39 percent—weighed less than 400 pounds. Forty-five of them, or about .37 percent, weighed in between 400 and 449 pounds, while another 17, or about .14 percent, weighed between 450 and 499 pounds. Only about a dozen were heavier than that: seven of them, or about .06 percent, were between 500 and 549 pounds, and six others, or about .05 percent, were 550 pounds or more.
To read more, see the print edition or e-edition of the Friday, Oct. 9, Standard.