A new study reports people in rural areas often wait close to a half-hour for emergency responders to arrive, and are living in what have become known as “ambulance deserts.” Population decline is combining with a lack of volunteers to make matters worse in rural Iowa. Comments from Cole O’Donnell, city administrator, Keokuk, Iowa.
People in rural America are five times as likely to live in so-called “ambulance deserts” – areas far from an ambulance service or station – than those in urban areas. In rural Iowa, ambulance service has declined as the population dwindles. The study, from the Maine Rural Health Research Center, says half of all residents who live in ambulance deserts are in rural areas, more than 25 minutes from an ambulance station. Keokuk, along the banks of the Mississippi in eastern Iowa, has seen its population shrink to fewer than 10-thousand, with a sharp decline in ambulance service. City Administrator Cole O’Donnell says the situation got worse when officials were forced to close the local hospital.
“It frightened a lot of people. I know that we have older people that moved out of Keokuk to someplace closer to a hospital. You know, they had health problems and if something happened, they couldn’t wait those extra minutes, or even the extra minutes of getting them from Keokuk to a hospital.”
In addition to trying to bolster county ambulance service, O’Donnell says Keokuk is working to help reopen the local hospital as a federally designated Rural Emergency Hospital, which requires the facility to provide 24-7 emergency services and outpatient care.
Emergency medical service isn’t considered essential in rural America, and the federal government doesn’t fund it. So, volunteers form the backbone of E-M-S operations in many areas, including Iowa. But O’Donnell says in Keokuk, times have changed – it’s hard to find paramedics and E-M-Ts, let alone people who don’t get paid to do those jobs.
“When I was growing up in the ’70s and the 80s, my mom was even part of the first responders. You can’t even get first responders now to set up a service where they respond before the ambulance gets there, because nobody wants to volunteer anymore.”
While about 14-percent of Americans live in rural areas, the report shows they make up more than half of the population that lives in ambulance deserts.
***Courtesy of the Iowa News Service***
