By Shane Copps

The CIH is in full swing and seeing residents of Broadus. We are helping keep families together, helping the elderly stay at home longer and doing our best to make people feel better in their own home. We are working under an apprenticeship program and almost finished with the college level classes in order to be certified as Community Paramedics- Technician level. At this point, with the few individuals that are signed up, we estimate that we have saved them at least 6 ambulance rides, 6 Emergency Room visits, helped to connect 4 individuals to other services that increased their independence and wellbeing, and have done numerous health checks. We are helping to get residents of the county home sooner after being in the hospital and working with many doctors to help keep our family at home. We are able to do more things and help in more ways every day so please contact Shane or Kesa Copps if you think we can help you be healthier.

Powder River First Responders has been busy. We continue to train hard and respond quickly to your emergencies. We went on 15 calls for each of January and February and are at 7 this month. We have done over 26-man hours of training and have 2 more smaller courses planned for this month and 1 big class for May already. We were told a few weeks ago that we are some of the hardest training EMTs in the State of Montana. We like to think that this correlates into having some of the best EMTs in the state as well. We are always looking for people to join our ranks and for help in purchasing equipment.

We are planning on doing an EMT class this spring so please consider joining up. We understand that you may have trepidations or unpleasant thoughts about doing this job. Please come talk to us about those and let us tell you about the good things we do. We seem to get quite a few people who think we see lots of blood and gore and deal with numerous deceased persons. In 5 years, I have dealt with 3 deceased individuals and most of our crew haven’t been to those scenes. We do have some blood and gore at times, but usually less than 2% of our runs consist of a trauma response. This means that about 85-90% of our runs are taking someone who is sick or weak and getting them to the hospital. It’s usually very calm trips taking our friends, family, neighbors and residents to get some help.

We would like to thank some folks for donations in the last couple of months. These include Farm Bureau, North West Farm Credit, The SCDC ( Powder River Endowment fund), Jaymin and Brittani Aurand, Jackie and Craig Randall, The Montana Healthcare Foundation, Best Practice Medicine and 373 Consulting. I hope I am not forgetting anyone, but please know that your help and donations are greatly appreciated by our members and the residents of Powder River County. We would not be anywhere as good as we are without this help.