Atlas Twp. latest community to sign MedStar agreement
The Davison Index — With Richfield and Davison townships and the city of Davison already on board, Atlas Township is following suit and entering into an agreement with MedStar Ambulance.
“The idea behind the agreement is the other (communities) along the M-15 corridor are also in agreement with using MedStar as their preferred provider,” said Atlas Township Supervisor Shirley Kautman-Jones. “It should allow us to have faster response times from various strategic locations in or near the township.”
For communities on the periphery of Genesee County, response times for ambulances have been up to 30 minutes as rigs are staged centrally, where the majority of calls originate.
“If you lived at Corunna Road and I-75, it worked well,” Kautman-Jones said. “But people in the out-county, like us, you’d wait a very long time for an ambulance. If you had a (personal injury accident) and you needed multiple people transported, you had to figure out who was most critical because that person got put in the ambulance and (the rest) would have to wait for other ambulances to come. It just wasn’t a real good system.”
The agreement costs township residents nothing.
“We’re very hopeful that, because other communities have come together like a partnership, if we say we prefer MedStar and they can park a rig or two along that M-15 corridor, there will be enough call volume to service that area, that it makes sense for them to park an ambulance there,” Kautman- Jones said. “In a community that waits 30 minutes for an ambulance, I’m willing to try anything.”