Battle Creek ambulances are expected to respond to life-threatening emergencies within eight and a half minutes. That’s been the standard since the 1990s.
But a new contract the City Commission is discussing Tuesday may be more lenient.
LifeCare Ambulance has struggled to meet response time guidelines for several years. In 2024, ambulances were on time for less than 80% of top-priority calls.
According to the most recent contract, that number should be 90%.
Normally, LifeCare would pay a penalty for this, potentially thousands of dollars a month. But the company hasn’t been paying.
That’s because that contract expired two years ago.
A new contract
LifeCare is still responding to 911 calls, and still reporting metrics to the City.
CEO Ron Slagell said LifeCare has been working on a new contract, one that allows ambulances to arrive later, within 10 minutes. But it’s taken some time.
"Anytime you change something, people are going to question it," he said.
"So we had to get the data, we had to show the reports, we had to show the best practices."
The new contract emphasizes quality of care.
"If you're getting there on time and you're treating the patients badly," Slagell said, "that's not good either."
The National Association of EMTs says evaluating providers solely based on response time increases the risk of vehicle crashes.
And, it ignores key metrics like patient care, experience, and outcomes.
When ambulances respond to calls with lights on and sirens blaring, they only administer potentially life-saving care about 7% of the time, according to a 2020 study.
Slagell said it's rare that calls dispatched as Priority One are truly life-threatening emergencies.
But, some patients' outcomes are dependent on when medical help arrives.
The crucial factor in those cases, Slagell says, is not the ambulance but the first responders.
"Typically in our area, that's the area fire department. They're trained medical first responders, and they're the ones that can make the biggest difference in getting there in those first several minutes."
LifeCare has been struggling to meet the 8.5 minute response time window since 2019. Slagell said that's due to several factors.
"We've seen a huge shift in population growth and therefore emergency calls in the southern parts of the city of Battle Creek, South of I-94," he said.
More calls are coming from farther away from the hospital, making for a longer trip.
And, the emergency room is overcrowded.
That means "the ambulance crew is essentially stuck in the emergency room waiting to get their stretcher cleared before they can go onto the next call."
Even a few minutes of delay, he said, can impact how fast a crew can respond.
Also, LifeCare is taking more patients directly to hospitals in Kalamazoo. And, more often, LifeCare's ambulances are used to transfer behavioral health patients to inpatient hospitals in Southeast Michigan and Indiana.
But Slagell said 10 minutes, which matches requirements in Kalamazoo and Portage, is a reasonable target.