OKTIBBEHA COUNTY — With OCH Regional Medical Center’s sale on the horizon, the city, county and Mississippi State University are once again discussing the creation of a county-wide emergency services district, allowing all three to use the same ambulance service.
During Monday’s Oktibbeha County Board of Supervisors meeting, County Administrator Wayne Carpenter updated the board on a meeting that took place between the three stakeholders May 28, discussing consolidating the service.
“The consensus at the end of the meeting is that we all agreed that a consolidated ambulance service would be in the best interest of all three stakeholders,” Carpenter said. “We discussed possibly setting up an emergency services district for the entire county.”
Carpenter said the plan, if all stakeholders agree to it, would create a council to govern the emergency services district including representatives from all three entities.
Those representatives would work together to develop a request for proposals, then select the best service provider that would suit the needs of the district as a whole – eliminating any possibility of ambiguity around which ambulance service should be responding to any given emergency, Carpenter said.
“There’s a lot of disadvantages to having two contracts servicing the county,” Carpenter said. “There’s potential for confusion in dispatching. There’s just a number of cons associated with having your services flip. And in my personal opinion, we would all be better served if we could consolidate these services under one provider, regardless of who that provider is.”
While OCH Regional Medical Center publicly appealed for a unified emergency medical service district that included the city in April 2018, the city chose to enter its first contract with third-party ambulance provider Pafford EMS, making its own emergency services district within municipal boundaries.
The hospital continued providing its own ambulance service to the county through 2023, when the medical center’s board announced the services would be privatized through a partnership with Global Medical Response, routed through its company MedStat.
In August, Raymond James Financial Services presented a feasibility study to county supervisors, recommending the hospital’s sale. After a months-long request for proposals process, the county announced last month that it had entered negotiations with Baptist Memorial Health Care for the sale, with hopes of closing the deal by fall.
With that transition in the works, Carpenter said, conversations about creating an emergency services district in the area are ongoing once again.
“I’m getting questions from the potential buyer as to how we want to proceed,” Carpenter told The Dispatch on Monday. “I can’t really discuss much about the details of the negotiations, but we’re trying to figure out what the future of ambulance services in Oktibbeha County look like in relation to the sale of the hospital.”
The county hospital’s contract with MedStat renews on June 30, Carpenter told the board, and the city’s contract with Pafford is up for renewal the following year.
“We’ve still got a lot of time,” Carpenter told the board. “But now’s the time to figure out what we’re going to move to to maintain those services countywide.”
Carpenter told The Dispatch that the current plan is for the hospital to renew the MedStat contract until another decision can be made on the county’s ambulance services, meaning there will be no lapse in services during the hospital transition or the potential creation of the district.
However, if the new service district RFP process is put into place, Baptist, Pafford and MedStat could all compete with bids for district service, he told the board.
City exploring the idea
But District 4 Supervisor Pattie Little, who attended the stakeholder meeting along with Carpenter, clarified that the city had not yet committed to join the district.
“The city did not say they were going to do it,” Little said. “They’re waiting to see. They did not say they were going to join the group.”
“They can have their own service inside the city limits, and that’s entirely up to them,” Carpenter said in response. “But if we could join together as the three stakeholders for the betterment of all involved, then I think that’s the way forward.”
Mayor Lynn Spruill said discussions are still “exploratory,” and she is still looking into what the creation of the emergency services district would mean for the city. While she sees the advantage of creating the district as a potential way to mitigate confusion during an emergency, she said there are still other factors to consider in terms of the city’s input, administration and quality of its ambulance services.
“Intuitively, you may think there would be opportunities there for a working relationship that would be more efficient,” Spruill said. “But again, I don’t know until we see what that means, and what that means for the city, because obviously my hat is a city hat and I need to make sure we’re getting what we need out of the process.”
Carpenter said stakeholders are anticipated to meet again within the next three weeks to continue discussions.
Kim Alexander, director of public relations and internal communications for Baptist, deferred questions about ambulance services back to the county.
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