MARLBORO COUNTY, SC (WBTW) – Marlboro County Council created an Emergency Medical Services (EMS) task force to help with ambulance response times.

The task force is made up of three council members, the administrator, three people from the Marlboro General Hospital Charities Trust Board, and three people from Marlboro County Rescue.

“Marlboro County Council recently completed strategic planning, and as a result of that, one of the initiatives was to make sure that we stay on top of EMS, and other issues that are challenged because of the loss of our hospital,” said Marlboro County Administrator, Ron Munnerlyn.

Munnerlyn said county council recognized a need for the task force in Marlboro County.

“A lot of it had to do with when we had spikes in calls, and it’s slower response times because it’s a bunch of calls at one time,” he said. “We all came to the conclusion that if we don’t have a hospital we’ve got to have a super-duper EMS system.”

Munnerlyn said the loss of Marlboro Park Hospital three years ago, affected ambulance response times in Marlboro County.

“The hospital was a for-profit hospital and they determined that there wasn’t any profit here so they moved on,” he said. “Before, when the ambulance service picked up someone to take them to the hospital, they could take them to Marlboro Park Hospital, which was centrally located in Bennettsville. Now, that same patient may have to go to Scotland County, Cheraw, or even Dillon.”

He said without Marlboro Park Hospital, ambulances get backed-up at Scotland Memorial Hospital and McLeod Health Cheraw which costs EMS more time on the road.

“You can’t say it’s just the transport time, because they can’t turn around,” he said. “It’s thirty or forty-five minutes before they [EMS] can release the patient and move on.”

The County Administrator said county council has looked at neighboring counties with EMS systems to see how they operate.

“We can compare ourselves to other counties, for example, Marion County operates an EMS system, but they have a hospital so that’s sort of the unknown that we need to try and get a handle on,” he said.

He said because there isn’t a hospital in Marlboro County, EMS drivers spend extra time driving to surrounding hospitals.

“I sat down and I had a number of calls for last year,” he explained. “I looked at where they originated, by town, and I imagined the ones from Bennettsville would go to Scotland County, and I added the transport time, just the distance, so it’s completely an educated guess. It looked like fifty to sixty hours more a week, just on the roads.”

Munnerlyn said the task force is working to determine what the budget is to operate an EMS system, as well as, what it would take to fund it.

“More than likely it’s going to lead to a point where we need more funding,” he said. “There are two sources of funding. One’s county tax payer dollars, we have a special tax millage now we collect just for this purpose,” he explained. “The other is the ambulance billing people through their insurance. So we’d have to see what the county would have to do and if the taxes had to go up for that.”

He said the biggest issue the task force faces is EMS not being able to respond to calls within county fast enough because they are already out on a call.

“You’ll have a time where four hours will go by with two calls, and then all the sudden in thirty minutes, you’ll have six calls,” Munnerlyn said. “There’s been times where we’re strained because we have units transporting and that’s been felt.”

Munnerlyn said the EMS task force will meet every two weeks. The next meeting is on Feb. 27.