Alabama County on the Verge of Losing its Only Ambulance
PICKENS COUNTY, Ala.
In the three weeks since Pickens County dropped down to one ambulance, two women died after waiting an hour for paramedics to arrive.
One woman went into cardiac arrest and died before an ambulance could arrive in Aliceville, her small town in rural west Alabama.
Volunteer first responders performed CPR for an hour as they waited for an ambulance to make the 50-mile drive from Tuscaloosa.
It was a bad weather day so the helicopter couldn’t make it in time either.
Another woman, just 37, went into heart failure at the federal prison in Aliceville.
The county’s only ambulance was transporting another patient so it took about an hour to get to her. She died shortly after arriving at the hospital.
“We’ll never know if she would’ve lived if we made it on time,” said Vicky Sullivan McCrory, the paramedic manager at Pickens County Ambulance Service. “But I think she would have. I think her situation could’ve been corrected.”
Pickens County moved to only one ambulance on October 25th.
The reduction in ambulance service is just the latest in a downward spiral, as rural communities across Alabama watch emergency rooms and hospitals shutter, and as pediatricians, dentists and maternity care have disappeared in over a third of the state’s counties.
Sullivan McCrory said her team of paramedics has had to triage callers ever since the move to one ambulance. She said it’s not unusual to get two to three calls within an hour, forcing them to decide where to go based on which call is most life-threatening.
“All I know is people are suffering,” she told AL.com. “What can you do when you have one ambulance in a county with over 19,000 people in it?”
Pickens County used to have more people. But it lost its only hospital in 2020, and the population has gone down by 10.5% since then.
“The loss of critical medical infrastructure threatens not just individual health,” said Stephen Katsinas, director of the Education Policy Center at the University of Alabama, “but the entire sustainability of rural communities.”
Alabama has the second lowest number of ambulance stations per capita in the country, according to a report by the Rural Health Research and Policy Centers.
Al.com
