A Sitka-based emergency care organization has received a large grant to support EMS training across the region.
The Alaska Department of Health announced Oct. 22 it completed funding for the first year of the Rural Health Transformation Program, a five-year, 50-billion-dollar federal program Congress approved last year to bolster health care in rural areas in the U.S.
Alaska was one of the leading recipients, securing $272,174,856 for the health department to divvy up across the state.
Southeast Region EMS Council, or SEREMS, received $616,438 to strengthen the region’s EMS workforce. Anjela Johnston is the executive director at SEREMS. She said they plan to use the grant to launch an EMS academy to connect rural communities to training hubs in Sitka, Juneau, and Ketchikan starting in January. The grant would cover the cost of travel and training for about 60 people.
“Long term, the goal is to have a region-wide kind of training network,” Johnston said.
Johnston said Ketchikan will host a fundamental EMS course and Sitka will offer training for emergency trauma technicians. Juneau’s course will be dedicated to instructor development and leadership training to better support workers in a field that sees a lot of turnover.
“If a community doesn’t have money to pay people to deliver the service and to manage the service that they’re delivering, it gets overwhelming really quickly,” Johnston said.
She said in addition to training, rural emergency response groups could also benefit from funding for physical infrastructure and shared services between communities.
“So if you layer the complexity of healthcare on top of this — and EMS is healthcare — when you layer that complexity on top of medical direction and protocols, there’s so much just to figure out,” she said.
Johnston said they hope to build long-term, sustainable partnerships across Southeast to foster a supportive emergency response network.
