While a police investigation into possible misuse of Lewis County Fire District 5’s medication is still ongoing, the Napavine-based fire department has resumed its advanced life support (ALS) medical delivery service and made changes internally in an effort to prevent any future abuse of the district’s inventory.
ALS delivery is provided when a patient is in critical condition and a paramedic is required to assist in the treatment of the patient before or during transport to an emergency facility.
District 5 temporarily suspended ALS delivery in August “due to questions on what’s going on with some of our medication,” Interim District 5 Chief Gregg Peterson told a Chronicle reporter at the time.
“As soon as we saw that this was a problem, we just said, ‘We’re going to stop right now,’” Peterson told a Chronicle reporter on Thursday.
Investigators have since determined that none of District 5’s current staff, including its two paramedics, were involved in the incident that led to the investigation, Peterson said.
“As soon as they were cleared, then we came back and then we figured out how we were going to come back up and run in a way that people had confidence in what we were doing,” Peterson said.
The crux of the issue that launched the investigation was missing medication inventory, Peterson said.
“It was simply materials missing,” Peterson said, adding that a doctor working with investigators has reviewed District 5’s patient charts and determined the medication misuse did not affect patient care.
“There was nobody who did not get proper medication and nobody who was given too much,” Peterson said.
To better protect inventory at District 5’s main station in Napavine, the fire district has upgraded its narcotics safes and installed surveillance cameras inside the station. The district has also set up a new inventory system that tracks items with radio-frequency identification tags and doesn’t allow one person to have access to everything in the narcotics inventory.
“We just put a lot of checks and balances into this system,” Peterson said, adding, “We learned a lot (from the investigation). We can step forward in a much better way than we were months ago.”
District 5’s ALS delivery resumed service in late November. The district currently has several part-time paramedics employed, but is looking to hire a third full-time paramedic.
District 5 is looking for candidates who already have experience in the field, Peterson said.
“We can’t fill up on brand new paramedics … We don’t want any glitches,” he said.
For more information, visit http://lcfpd5.com/.
Other improvement projects Lewis County Fire District 5 is working on include acquiring new air packs, which will be paid for with levy funds in the spring, and working on concept designs for a new station building to be built in the Napavine station’s parking lot. That project, which would be entirely funded with grant money the district recently secured from the state, would fix the problem of fire crews having to cross the train tracks to access the district’s fire trucks and other apparatus, Peterson said.
