Since 2015, the Community Paramedic Program has helped patients who are at higher risk of falling through the cracks after hospitalization. Ideally, patients recover best at home after they are discharged, but what if they don’t have anyone at home to help them?
That’s where the Community Paramedic Program comes in. Started with initial funding from Cape Fear Valley Health Foundation, it is now celebrating a decade of care.
Manager and paramedic Alinda Bailey joined just a few months after it began.
“Initially, we focused on some of the prime diseases that we saw people repeatedly coming into the Emergency Department for, like congestive heart failure, COPD, and pneumonia, and we worked with discharged Medicare patients, following up once or twice a week for 30 days,” Bailey said. “We might make phone calls for them, or make sure they had everything they needed, like prescriptions and oxygen, and that they could use them. We’d visit their home and check in to do proactive education, making sure they knew how often to take their nebulizer or use a pulse oximeter.”
The program quickly grew, but the common thread remains the belief that some patients need a little extra hands-on follow-up to prevent extra Emergency Department visits or 911 calls.
“We’ve gotten into working with diabetes a lot lately,” Bailey said. “As our scope has expanded, we’ve written more protocols for how to help patients with different issues. We have more tools now, too. We often work with the Discharge Clinic, which helps patients who need a primary care doctor to follow up with, or can’t make their appointment, perhaps because they’re bedbound or lack transportation.”
The team has grown as well, from one manager and two paramedics to a manager, 10 paramedics, a social worker and a behavioral health peer support specialist. Beyond medical assistance, the program also looks at the social determinants of health, such as helping a patient look for insurance, food bank assistance, or connecting them to other community resources.
The Foundation continues to support the program by funding items needed for recuperation at home, such as pulse oximeters, blood pressure cuffs and scales.
“A hospital is a good place to be when you’re really sick, but when you begin to feel better, you recuperate better at home,” Bailey said. “People want to stay with their pets and live their everyday lives as normally as possible.”
Since starting, the program has helped more than 8,300 individuals, making more than 66,000 patient contacts via phone calls, home visits, community health fairs and other community outreach events. The program sees patients on a regular basis for anywhere from a month to several years, as long as they need to.
Chief Clinical Officer and Chairman of Emergency Medicine, Michael J. Zappa, MD, FACEP has seen how the program has made a difference.
“Our Community Paramedic Program demonstrates innovation in healthcare at its finest,” Dr. Zappa said. “It gets back to the roots of medicine by delivering care in the home, yet uses modern analytics and technology to identify those patients most at risk – and takes the critical step of the correct intervention at the right time. They help people get back to their normal lives more quickly and spend less time in the hospital.”