Okay, I'd like to call this public safety meeting to order at 6 01 on Monday, September 15th.

Our first order of business is to approve the minutes from the June 23rd meeting.

Do I have a motion to approve?

Uh I'll make a motion.

And I will second that.

All in favor, say aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Opposed.

And that motion passes.

Our second order of business is a communication from Fire Chief Fair Fire Chief Fairbanks regarding the neighborhood paramedic program and an annual update from firefighter and paramedic Oliver Harper.

Gentlemen, you have the floor.

Thank you.

I'd like to uh again thank everyone for giving us this opportunity to kind of showcase what our neighborhood paramedic program has been up to over the last year.

This is Oliver Harper to my left.

He has been in the position for almost a year, about 11 months and change.

So we always kind of look forward to seeing what has transpired and how the program has evolved to help our citizens, specifically here in Lakewood.

So with no further ado, I'll turn the floor over to Oliver.

Hello, thanks.

So on the agenda here first.

Oh boy.

There we go.

Just kind of uh some housekeeping on how it looked this time last year, and then new things we've gotten into, um, some struggles I've had, and then some some future planning to see what it can become later down the road here.

This time last year, um, it it kind of, as you are aware, fall prevention was the the bread and butter and kind of the infancy of the program.

Um each visit had a smoke alarm inspection.

Um I think since since then I've added in things like reconcile medications.

Um I started working a lot with Lakewood Alive to do a uh aging in place assessment to kind of gather all the resources the city offers kind of in-house.

Um I've since added doing a lot more uh primary care doctor visits, or I'm sorry, uh helping the primary care be involved more with uh the patients.

Seems like they're kind of on the outskirts a lot.

Um and now we kind of partnered with a chronic condition um uh clinic here in the city to have some referrals go both ways, which is gonna be again helpful for keeping people out of the hospital and keep them safe at home.

New initiatives we've we began.

We we partnered with uh the centers, it's a behavioral health urgent care down in uh Gordon Square.

We found there was just uh a huge volume of mental health calls that were not critical, they weren't violent and not actively trying to harm themselves.

So we found that the centers offers an Uber ride after they get cleared directly to this location, and they can't handle the whole the whole circle of uh mental health.

They do on site, they have a behavioral health clinician, they do a pharmacy on site.

Um so it kind of helps us keep people out of getting chewed up in the ER and not getting too definitive care.

Um, we've had I think huge success.

I think I've sent four people there, and of the four, three have not called 911 since.

So it's super super helpful.

They handle it all in-house.

Um, they case manage, they have social work, psychiatry.

Uh like I mentioned, the uh the chronic care clinic is here in the city.

So for patients who are uh high risk for COPD and uh congestive heart failure exacerbations, which is a huge number of people that get kind of bouncing back and forth between the ED.

Um they manage it same day appointments, sometimes they do outpatient to manage these things so people are able to get the treatment and be back home and not again not getting chewed up in the ED for something that is best managed at home.

And then with that, um kind of a two-way um referral program where I can send people to them, they can send them once they're discharged to me and say it'd be super beneficial if you could visit uh Joe Smith down the street and make sure he's taking his meds, he's not getting too much weight from water, etc.

Um, and lastly, here we have the the Fairview readmission prevention team.

I think this is so far gonna be the most beneficial um hospital partnership.

I kind of have direct access to the uh social worker who's a nurse who is in charge of making sure people are not readmitted for the same conditions within 30 days of discharge, and it's been super helpful to get information back and forth from the hospital systems, which is usually kind of lock and key.

Um, again, treating people at home and preventing from going to the ED and getting chewed up.

In the field so far, we've had about six hoarding house cleanouts I've been part of.

Um what it looks like on on my end is keeping people in in touch with their um in-home their food, in home health care, um PT, OT, all those kind of things that they don't have access to as soon as they have dangerous hoarding conditions.

And I think without having kind of a liaison between the fire department and these other resources, they get lost in the mix because no one is referring them.

They can say no to CPS or uh APS.

Um I've I've been monitoring medication use and high with the uh high risk users and falls in the in the community, and you find that people have three or four prescriptions for the same med from three or four different doctors, different hospital systems.

Again, it's kind of this point where they they call 911 and they want to go somewhere different a lot, and I've been able to consolidate to single doctors, single hospital systems, eliminate redundant meds, um, because you know if they're taking three different doses of the same medication, they're they're a higher fall risk, they're they're not actually treating anything, they're probably creating new issues.

Um again, that's with connecting with the social work has been super helpful at um at Fairview specifically because I think a lot of our our residents end up going there if they call 911.

So being in touch with the ED and the doctors is is uh I think a unique opportunity for us to to make sure the care plan stays at home.

Again, so we're we're having a lot of success with I'll I'll do a few home visits a week for maybe a month, and their medicine makes more sense, they're on a dosing routine.

Um I leave them documents so they can write down the name of the med, the dose, what it's used for, which I think it gets lost when people get discharged.

They got a big packet of paper that says a bunch of stuff and they don't know what it means in layman's terms.