By Jill Fennema –

At last week’s Pipestone County Board meeting there was a very light agenda. One matter that the county did undertake was to sign a one-year contract with HealthEast Care System.

Pipestone County Sheriff Keith Vreeman explained that the state mandated that all dispatchers have training for giving medical advice over the phone. That proved to be difficult for counties that have several full-time dispatchers, but only one working at a time.

“It’s very hard for a small dispatch like us to do. You only have one person dispatching.” Keith explained. If the dispatcher is on the phone giving medical advice, they cannot be answering the next emergency call.

The state allows for an emergency call to be transferred to another agency that can give medical advice. HealthEast is one of those agencies.

When the call is transferred to HealthEast, the local dispatcher can stay on the line until they are sure the person dealing with the emergency has the help they need and until they have the correct address and any information that local EMS will need to respond to the scene of the emergency.

As of right now, there is no charge for this and the county anticipates not needing the service all that often. There is some training that comes with it for the dispatchers, but the county sheriff’s office has a grant for that.