Whenever there is an emergency medical situation, Emergency Medical Services may be the first to respond, but on a County and State level, EMS is not considered “essential”, like law enforcement or fire departments.

The Iowa Emergency Medical Services Association will be making their annual plea to state lawmakers to make EMS an essential service at their Day on the Hill tomorrow. Association members will be talking to lawmakers at the Capitol about creating systemic funding for EMS to be able to attract and retain an increased workforce, purchase necessary infrastructure, and expand coverage into rural areas that need it most. Stuart Rescue and Panora EMS Director Joe Hupp explains the role EMS plays in Guthrie County, “People are always going to need medical care, people are always going to be sick, people are always going to be hurt, and you’ve got to have people to take care of them. If you don’t have people in your own county to take care of them, then people from other counties or other departments have to come in and do that. So if we can fund the departments that we already have established in our county and keep it in our county, that just makes sense to me.”

Hupp adds, a few years ago it was calculated that ambulance services receive about 7 times more calls than a fire department, and while Panora EMS receives its funds from patients and contributions from townships and cities, it doesn’t cover one full-time employee’s salary.