With the coronavirus and social isolating limiting their ability to make in-home visits, Community Care paramedics have managed to continue to care for homebound patients and even find other ways to help.
Program coordinator Joey Gibson, who leads a team of five, said they’ve been checking in by phone with about half of their 60 active patients.
“Patients that we can do phone calls instead of visits, we do that, calling them once a week,” he said. “If they have concerns we go out to see them.”
Other patients, however, still require in-person visits.
“These are high–risk patients, so we know if we discontinue those services, they are high risk of ending up back in the hospital,” Gibson said.
Reba Wyatt and Grady Passmore both have chronic medical conditions that require in-home visits.
“Joey comes and fills my medicine, and checks to see if Grady’s got any swelling, or problems with his blood pressure and temperature,” Wyatt said. “And if I call Joey he usually comes even if it’s after his work time. Grady’s heart rate got to 150, and I didn’t know what to do. Joey came right over.
“He’s a good one. I don’t think anybody can beat Joey.”
As a precaution, the team has had to cut back on the time they spend visiting a patient at home – and that’s a blow to some patients for whom a few minutes of chatting with the paramedics is some of the best medicine they get.
“We’re wearing masks into the homes and spending less time in the homes, not sitting down to chat, which is one of things they want most,” Gibson said.
“It’s heartbreaking,” he said. “So many of our patients really look forward to that weekly visit. For some of them it’s the only time they get a chance to see people.”
With stay-at-home orders keeping people more isolated, the community paramedics have been helping residents who aren’t official patients by delivering medicine and food.
“Some are afraid to ride transit, so we’ve gone to CareNet and taken food boxes to some patients,” Gibson said.
He estimates they’ve helped out about 10 seniors.
“This is something we’re doing on a short-term basis until all this is over,” Gibson said. “Our opening goal was to just keep these patients out of the hospital. This is kind of stretching it, but if we can reduce those patients’ risk, it’s very worthwhile.”
Community Care gets its regular patients mostly from hospital referrals.
“Patients are discharged and don’t quality for home health and other services,” Gibson said. “We also get some from doctors’ offices, such as a patient who for whatever reason is not compliant on their medication. So we go in and look at their pill planner and it still has some medicine in it. Or we’ll see that someone who needs to manage their weight isn’t weighing themselves. We try to find out why.”
Gibson said the program is taking new patients. Anyone interested in seeing if they qualify, or to get more information about Community Care services, can call 828-371-9461 from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday.