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Table of Contents:
St. Mary's County Lands Grant to Get Mobile Integrated Health Off the Ground
Idaho Wants More Multitasking Paramedics
Community Paramedicine Asks Providers to Care Differently, Not Just Work Differently
Region of the Week: Santa Fe, New Mexico
Read Time: 6 minutes
St. Mary's County found out just a day before its Aug. 12 Emergency Services Board meeting that it had landed a state grant to build a Mobile Integrated Health program, part of a wider effort called St. Mary's 360.
EMS Chief Shawn Davidson broke the news to the board himself, calling it "super exciting" in the moment.
The idea is care that doesn't start and end with an ambulance ride. EMS staff and other health partners would be able to reach people in the community instead of routing everyone through 911 and the ER.
Davidson gave most of the credit to Dr. Brewster and the Health Department, who he said did "the lion's share of the legwork" on the application. Emergency Services will help build it out from here.
What's still missing: no dollar figure, no start date, and no word on who qualifies. One commenter at the meeting also raised a real tension: the county already says it's short on paramedics and EMTs, so it's not yet clear who staffs a brand new program.
Idaho's EMS Bureau chief Wayne Denny wants to use federal rural health funding to expand community paramedicine programs into rural counties, aiming to place at least one community health EMS provider in every county that currently lacks one, as the state faces an October 30 deadline to spend the money or lose it back to the federal government.
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The author sat in on a Pennsylvania classroom of trainee community paramedics after they watched a documentary on the opioid crisis in Cape Cod. One student admitted he didn't feel as much for the people on screen as he expected to. That moment is really what the whole piece is about.
Burnout numbers back up why that happens. A 2024 survey found over half of EMS clinicians showing signs of burnout, and most of those already carrying compassion fatigue or vicarious trauma.
On a ride-along, the author expected a heavy mood and got jokes and banter instead. That humor is a release valve, but it can slide into something else, like a clinician muttering "not this person again" about a repeat caller.
A guest instructor pushed the class further by asking how they'd react if the person next to them started using heroin. The room went quiet. That was the point. She wanted them to sit with their own discomfort before they'd ever face it on a call.
The piece lands on a distinction worth remembering: empathy isn't the same as losing yourself in a patient's situation. The paramedics who last are the ones who stay close enough to actually help, without carrying every case home with them.
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Region of the Week: Santa Fe, New Mexico
It started in 2014 as a meeting between a newly elected mayor and a fire chief, and by 2016 it had a name: the Mobile Integrated Health Office, built to catch the frequent 911 callers and homeless seniors the system kept missing.
The program grew fast. By 2021 it spun off the Alternative Response Unit, sending social workers instead of officers to mental health calls, and by 2022 that unit had ballooned to 13 employees at its peak.
Then came the slide. A 2023 review called it "mission creep." The battalion chief who built the ARU resigned in 2024 saying his job had become "untenable." Call volume dropped from over 250 a month to under 100.
Early 2026 made it worse. The interim fire chief pulled the EMS captains out of the ARU, leaving it with almost no medical staff, and by April the behavioral health manager was gone too, down to five employees who told the paper they didn't have what they needed to succeed.
Now it's getting a new name and a new plan. The ARU is becoming the CARE team this fall, with a path for case managers to train up as EMTs, an attempt to rebuild the medical backbone the unit lost piece by piece over the last three years.