By Greg Jordan, Bluefield Daily Telegraph
PRINCETON — Officials from the Bluefield Rescue Squad and Princeton Rescue Squad went before the Mercer County Commission Tuesday to inquire about obtaining opioid settlement funds to purchase one new ambulance each.
Mark Brooks, CEO of the Princeton Rescue Squad, shared information from Medicare and the West Virginia EMS Coalition about how much it costs to answer one call involving an overdosing patient.
“What we want to talk about today a little bit is we would like to receive a little bit of that funding to help us continue on what we’re doing here in Mercer County,” Brooks said. “What we did is we pulled information that we gave you in your packet. We pulled information over the past four and a half years of how many overdoses we ran in the past four and a half years. And that number is 2,218 overdoses from Princeton Rescue Squad.”
Not every call results in the patient being transported to a hospital, he said. Sometimes a person at the scene gives the patient Narcan, a medication which helps counter an opioid overdose.
