Editor, Gazette-Journal:
On behalf of the dedicated squad members and the Board of Directors of the Mathews Volunteer Rescue Squad, we are providing this update on activities at MVRS.
Like other organizations, this has been a challenging year as we have had to implement significant changes in order to keep serving the citizens of Mathews County. As we have reported before, we are unable to attract enough volunteers to maintain our high level of emergency services to the citizens of Mathews County, so we have had to add additional part-time paid medics to our staff. After years of looking how we can secure more volunteer medics, we have found that we have two major issues working against us; one is the narrow pool of possible volunteers in our small county, and two, the time commitment that one has to make to become a certified provider is far too great for most of the eligible people. The good news, though, is that most of our paid medics have Advanced Life Support certifications and are highly skilled providers. This translates to high quality care for our citizens and because we staff our building nearly 24/7, faster response times.
In April 2009, we started an insurance-only billing policy in order to supplement our growing need to pay some part-time providers. Until recently, that program has helped us pay for all of our part-time staffing. Last year we began to see a rapid decline in our “insurance-only” billing funds that are used to cover the cost of paying these providers. The major reasons were the higher deductibles now present with most health insurance plans (resulting in many zero payments to us for our services) and a high increase in patient refusals (a patient that decides that they do not want to be transported to a hospital after calling 911). These two issues have resulted in a drastic decline in our funding. Our Board of Directors is working with our billing company and others to modify our current billing program to allow for this significant reduction in our funding. We will update you as soon as we can as to any changes. We know that we must alter the current system to maintain our funding as well as to keep in compliance with the ever-changing health insurance industry.
As always we want to thank you, the citizens of Mathews County, for your continued support of MVRS over these last 49 years!
Neal Hudgins, chairman
Mathews Volunteer Rescue Squad
Mathews, Va.