Paramedics? Plus Three Good Ideas from Other Towns

Suggestions I made to Mike Sullivan on the telephone this afternoon:

• To examine whether Medfield should upgrade its ambulance services from its current EMT level to paramedic services.  The town currently provide EMT services, and, as this layman understands the differences, the paramedics would be able to stabilize patients and administer medications to the patients before they are transported.  There are issues as to how much more it would cost to implement a paramedic service, and whether the residents would want to that higher amount to get that higher level of ambulance service.
• Get a copy of Westborough’s debris management plan, to see if it would help us to develop a plan on how to handle all the debris when a hurricane actually does hit Medfield.  I have been reading Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto, and most things seem to work much better when one has made a list in advance.  I started a little bit of the storm clean up discussion this week at the Board of Selectmen meeting, about where we should draw the line as to what the DPW clears away after a storm and what is beyond what we expect them to pick up.  Do we want the DPW to help residents by picking up branches from the side of roads placed there by the residents?  Mike, Ann and Mark all said no.  Seeing what the DPW did after Irene made me realize just what a good job they did and how well our town government seemed to work to get the town running after the storm – a nice example of government working well.  Nonetheless, it would be good to have a good checklist on how to do it if the storm is worse.
• Get a copy of Northeastern University’s Economic Development Self Assessment Tool to evaluate it to determine whether it would be useful exercise for Medfield to use to evaluate our strengths, our weaknesses, and to stimulate a discussion about what we are doing.
• Investigate whether the smart phone app developed by a Peabody police detective’s to facilitate community reporting would be useful to our residents and to the Medfield Police Department.

I saw the last three items discussed in the recent issue of The Beacon, the Massachusetts Municipal Association’s monthly magazine, which is usually a stimulating source of ideas.