AMBULANCE FIRMS CLEARED OF ALTERING RESPONSE TIMES.Byline: Kermit Pattison Daily News Staff Writer A follow-up investigation has exonerated two Ventura County ambulance companies of allegations of falsifying fal·si·fy v. fal·si·fied, fal·si·fy·ing, fal·si·fies v.tr. 1. To state untruthfully; misrepresent. 2. a. response times, officials said. Ventura County Emergency Medical Services An Emergency medical service (abbreviated to initialism "EMS" in many countries) is a service providing out-of-hospital acute care and transport to definitive care, to patients with illnesses and injuries which the patient believes constitutes a medical emergency. and fire officials said they have cleared CareLine California and Ojai Ambulance Company of accusations in a Fire Department report that the companies skewed skewed curve of a usually unimodal distribution with one tail drawn out more than the other and the median will lie above or below the mean. skewed Epidemiology adjective Referring to an asymmetrical distribution of a population or of data their dispatch records. Barbara Brodfuehrer, Ventura County emergency medical services administrator, said she reviewed records from January 1994 through October 1995 and found no evidence that the ambulance companies had deliberately misrepresented response times. "You can't say anything was falsified because there's no way to show it was or it wasn't," she said. In light of the Emergency Medical Services investigation, Ventura County Fire Chief Jim Sewell said his department agreed the discrepancies were caused by systematic problems rather than deliberate misrepresentation misrepresentation In law, any false or misleading expression of fact, usually with the intent to deceive or defraud. It most commonly occurs in insurance and real-estate contracts. False advertising may also constitute misrepresentation. . "It's a dead issue as far as we're concerned," Sewell said. A spokesman for the county's largest ambulance provider hailed the conclusions as a full exoneration The removal of a burden, charge, responsibility, duty, or blame imposed by law. The right of a party who is secondarily liable for a debt, such as a surety, to be reimbursed by the party with primary liability for payment of an obligation that should have been paid by the first party. , but said it could not fully heal the damage to the company's reputation. "The whole issue was ridiculous," said Steve Murphy Steve Murphy (born 1957-09-09) is a State Senator for the 28th district of Minnesota, and a member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. He represents parts of Goodhue, Wabasha, and Winona counties in the south-eastern portion of Minnesota. , vice president of government relations for CareLine, which is changing its name to MedTrans. "It was really disappointing they handled themselves the way they did . . . You can't ever repair that kind of disparagement In old English Law, an injury resulting from the comparison of a person or thing with an individual or thing of inferior quality; to discredit oneself by marriage below one's class. ." The issue arose last year when a confidential study by the Ventura County Fire Protection District concluded that the two ambulance companies misrepresented response times in more than 60 percent of their emergency calls. The June 8 internal memorandum by Wendee Riegner, an administrator in the the Ventura County Fire Protection District, said CareLine and Ojai Ambulance "falsified" response times by at least two minutes in more than 60 percent of calls in a sample of cases from March 1995. CareLine provides dispatch services for Ojai Ambulance. The Fire Department report did not mention the county's third ambulance company, Gold Coast Ambulance of Oxnard. Ambulance companies blasted the study as inaccurate and suggested the Fire Department was twisting the facts in an effort to justify firefighters taking over the service. "It's unconscionable Unusually harsh and shocking to the conscience; that which is so grossly unfair that a court will proscribe it. When a court uses the word unconscionable to describe conduct, it means that the conduct does not conform to the dictates of conscience. to make that kind of allegation in the manner in which it was handled originally," Murphy said in an interview Tuesday. Response times represent one of the most important criteria for granting ambulance contracts. Under their agreements with the county, ambulance companies must reach emergencies within prescribed times in at least 90 percent of calls. The county's contracts with the three ambulance companies expire in June. The Ventura County Board of Supervisors The examples and perspective in this article or section may represent an unduly geographically limited view of the subject. Please [ improve this article] or discuss the issue on the talk page. The Board of Supervisors is the body governing counties in the U.S. voted last year to continue its exclusive contracts with the three private companies despite county firefighters' bid to compete for the service. Brodfuehrer said both CareLine and Ojai Ambulance had fulfilled the obligations of their contracts. But Brodfuehrer said the inquiry did uncover discrepancies in practices for recording dispatch times between the Fire Department and the ambulance companies. She said the two systems were being synchronized syn·chro·nize v. syn·chro·nized, syn·chro·niz·ing, syn·chro·niz·es v.intr. 1. To occur at the same time; be simultaneous. 2. To operate in unison. v.tr. 1. to avoid confusion in the future. Although Sewell expressed regret for discrediting the ambulance companies, he said the Fire Department had a duty to bring the questions to light. "We weren't conspiring with anyone," Sewell said. "Originally our staff felt there was some information that needed to be looked at. They submitted that to the proper people and they looked at it. We would have been derelict derelict n. something or someone who is abandoned, such as a ship left to drift at sea or a homeless person ignored by family and society. (See: abandon, dereliction) DERELICT, common law. in our duties if we didn't point it out." |
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