Antelope Valley Medical Center in Lancaster is creating its first ambulance fleet to help address a shortage of ambulances in the Antelope Valley region.
Officials with the 420-bed medical center last month announced they had decided to lease two dedicated ambulances from El Monte-based MedResponse LLC. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The two ambulances will primarily transport patients to skilled-nursing facilities, acute rehabilitation centers, other high-level care facilities or patients’ homes. They will not be used for emergency transport of patients to the hospital.
The aim is to help address a regionwide shortage of nonemergency ambulance service due to labor shortages, long delays for new ambulances and low reimbursement rates from the state’s Medi-Cal program. In late 2022, one of the nation’s largest ambulance services, Greenwood Village, Colorado-based American Medical Response Inc., cut ambulance service to seven hospitals in Los Angeles County, eliminating approximately 28,000 non-emergency transports per year.
This cutback in service has come as an aging population has resulted in steadily increasing demand for non-emergency transports to skilled nursing, rehabilitation and other medical facilities, particularly following surgical procedures done in hospitals.
It’s against this backdrop that Antelope Valley Medical Center decided to add its own ambulances and to staff the ambulance transports. The hospital had been averaging about seven patient transports a day. What’s more, the hospital’s 1,500-square-mile service territory is unusually large for a hospital in Los Angeles County, making for longer-duration transports.
According to the announcement, having its own ambulance service means Antelope Valley Medical Center will help ensure a continuity of care during the patient transition between medical facilities, thereby reducing stress for patients and their families and caregivers. It also will enable the hospital to better coordinate and streamline ambulance dispatch.
“We’re not in the transportation business, but we had to make a strategic decision for a complex issue,” Edward Mirzabegian, the medical center’s chief executive, said in the announcement. “By directly managing our own fleet, we can maintain a higher level of control over response times, quality of service, and overall patient satisfaction.”