When the Guthrie County Emergency Medical Services Advisory Council was first formed they looked to create a single service for the County.

Guthrie County Public Health Coordinator Jotham Arber says that this idea was actually met with quite a bit of resistance, as the current services wanted to keep their identity, and the cities they were in wanted to keep control of their services. He mentions that although the original idea didn’t seem like it was going to work, the Council didn’t give up.

“And so when we brought that back, we had realized that the ideas that we had for the county service were very much still applicable to a county system, and that we could tackle this in another way that would bring them on board. Because we talked many times about, we don’t want to create a system that sinks what we already have. We (don’t) want to take them from where they are because we’ve got good service in those areas. We’re just trying to expand that service now and make it available to everybody.”

Arber mentions that with the Request for Proposal (RFP), all services will keep their identity, and gives them a list of what the County wants to have go into this system. He adds that the RFP will also ask the current service providers what they need to make sure they can help make the system successful.