Program leans on paramedics from across Maine to maintain round-the-clock treatment at a remote rural clinic

Jackman Community Health Center
(Photo from Rural Health Information Hub)

Staffing challenges put a small clinic in rural northwestern Maine at risk of being unable to offer urgent care outside of regular business hours to the Moose River Valley's roughly 1,500 residents, reports Gretel Kauffman for the Rural Health Information Hub. To close the gap, local healthcare leaders opted to try out a new program that would allow paramedics from across the state to staff the Jackman Community Health Center after regular hours and on weekends. 

"The program, which was designed and developed through a series of community meetings and discussions, allows the paramedics to perform basic urgent care procedures and connect with emergency department physicians" at a hospital in Bangor, Kauffman writes. 

Without the initiative, dubbed the Critical Access Integrated Paramedics program, residents of the Moose River Valley who needed urgent treatment would have to travel nearly an hour to Bangor. For nearly two decades the town of Jackman had been unable to retain a new doctor for more than a year and a half, Kauffman reports. Now specially trained paramedics can sign up to provide emergency medical services to residents who need it. 

"I think of EMS as the spackle of healthcare: If there’s a crack, you can use EMS ability,” said Dr. Jonnathan Busko, one of the lead organizers of the CAIP initiative. “This is a big crack being filled by EMS, but now all of these other small cracks are being identified — we can also do this, and this, and this.” Kauffman reports that new CAIP initiative is being used as a pilot project that could be adapted to communities across Maine, should the program prove itself effective to the state's EMS board.