Okay, calling this meeting of public safety to order, and um although we don't have to officially excuse people on our elected uh uh board member um um com Mr.

Fyan sends his regrets he was not able to make it today.

Um so uh the first item up for business is um an update from our medical on our medical priority and wellness work um from our fire chief afternoon.

This is a uh midpoint update on our medical priority and wellness response team.

Uh just a brief reminder this is not the hot team that is still operating full force uh daily out in the streets.

This is an additional preventative type program that the fire department uh has been exploring, and um this falls under the the term community risk reduction, much like our fire prevention division does with smoke alarms and education on the fire side.

This is a very similar type program on the medical side, which comprises about 64% of our responses.

Uh we entered this uh in partnership with Corewell Health.

We have them here today, and we're excited to share with you just a few outcomes that we've experienced in the first six months of this program operating.

So uh our EMS captain, Captain Hutter is gonna briefly walk us through the presentation.

Matt.

He's taller than me.

There we go.

All right.

Hey, good afternoon.

It's hard to believe six months ago we were even talking about this.

We were getting ready to buy Christmas presents and and do all that.

So I can't believe we're here already.

But yes, the medical priority and wellness response, better known as our empowered team.

Um, sometimes it's easier to say medical outreach, but however you look at it, that's exactly what we're trying to do is is out if gives give some medical outreach to our citizens.

And six months ago, we talked about how there were 17,000 medical alarms in the city of Grand Rapids back in 2024, which is up from 5,000 back in 1990.

And we realized that about 14 percent of those incidents were have a repeat 911 caller.

That said 32 of them of those those uh excuse me, those patients, if you will, they had 10 plus incidents per year.

So, as Chief said, so so correctly, this is a preventative program.

We've been preventing fires for many decades now, and now it's time to start preventing some of the medicals that we've been running on.

That said, we've had some pretty good momentum in that first year.

We've had 30 total referrals, 27 of them came from our our fire companies, so the engine and the truck companies, and many of those referrals were proactive from the captains and the lieutenants on those.

And so they weren't necessarily just repeat callers.

Some were, but some were more proactive.

We've been able to work with those people as well.

Um we've had a few, there's called what's known as the Cheeto List, not be confused with the thing that you eat out of that bag that processed food, but it's called the Cheeto List, Core Well Health Emergency Department Overuse List.

And um, we are working to build our referral pathway through that a little bit more.

That's something that we're doing.

And uh they the ER also has community health workers as well.

My associate here, William, he's a community health worker with Core Well Health, and so it turns out something that was new to me is there's core there's uh community health workers all over the place, and they kind of work behind the scenes getting resources for people.

And so that's been kind of fun to learn and work with them.

And so moving on, we've had 175 client interactions.

That means of those 30 referrals, we've been seeing our clients many, many times, some more than others because they do require specialized attention.

Um, but in that in that time we've made 76 resource connections with different resources that are out there, different programs that are able to help the members of our community.

And we've also worked with some case managers as well.

Just a couple of wins that we've had over the last few months now.

Up on Leonard Street Northwest, we've reduced calls from about five per month to two.

Zero would be best, but sometimes we can only make it to the point where we've reduced those calls, and that's still a win.

That's still keeping our fire engines and fire trucks in service longer and able to be able to help the people in dire need and have them available.

So we've been able to do that over on Sinclair.

We had 50% reduction in alarms there just by simply doing weekly checks and medication education and trying to help them navigate the system.

And over on Jeanette, um, somebody who would call us because in many re respects of loneliness, instead of calling 911, they called the empowered team direct, and we were able to divert some 91 calls, 911 calls doing that.

So pretty exciting stuff so far.

A growing support of uh growing circle of support, excuse me.

Obviously, we've we've been dealing with a lot of people over the last six months.

The the cool thing is we've been able to go in person, actually get into our car and drive to many of these different resources that we've been working with, make face-to-face relate face-to-face relationships, and actually talk to them about what we are and who we serve.

And so as you can see on the screen, there's uh just a number of different organizations, many of them I'm sure you've heard of over the last six months, and we've been able to connect our people with with these resources.

So we've been able to help secure some housing for a client that we've worked with with our homeless outreach team.

And a lot of stuff that we've been able to do, we've worked closely with home repair services of Kent County.

They're over there just uh north of Hall Street on Division.

And um one of the main things is they're still building it, but they're working on a working kitchen with somebody that has not had one since April of last year.

And so it's kind of hard to stay healthy when you don't have a kitchen.

So that's been a big win for us.

They're working on that.

Smoking sensation sensation, how about cessation, smoking cessation?