The Kanawha County Commission is considering providing free mental health services to emergency responders, a move that commission Chairman Lance Wheeler hopes will set an example for counties across the state.
“Mental health has been a hot topic nationwide since COVID-19, especially among paramedics,” Wheeler said. “…We want to make sure that paramedics are taken care of in all aspects of their medical care, whether that's through their personal insurance or by also taking their mental health into consideration.”
County commissioners on Thursday first discussed a contract with Christy Haynes, a licensed clinical social worker who also works as a volunteer firefighter and specializes in counseling emergency responders through her company, Overwatch. The county will pay Haynes a fee and provide her services free of charge to emergency responders.
Wheeler believes Kanawha County will be the first county in the state to contract with a mental health provider to provide services to the county's sheriff's deputies, 911 operators, emergency medical services and firefighters from the 26 volunteer fire departments that serve the county.
Wheeler said many volunteer fire departments can't get those services through their employers' insurance plans.
“But what we do know for sure is that our volunteer fire departments respond to calls of death, grief, loss and injury and witness these incidents firsthand, and many of them do it all the time,” Wheeler said.
Wheeler said it has been a goal of his to provide mental health services to paramedics since he became commissioner earlier this year, but the discussion comes just weeks after the death of a Kanawha County paramedic earlier this month. Wheeler said her death brought great sadness to the commission, the county's EMS and the sheriff's office as a whole. He said he wished the county had offered these types of mental health services sooner.
“I think her unfortunate death is an example of why this is important. We need to provide these mental health services to all emergency responders and make sure we're taking care of them while they're taking care of everyone else,” Wheeler said.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, emergency responders may be at higher risk for suicide because they work in stressful environments. Police officers and firefighters are more likely to die by suicide than die in the line of duty. Studies have shown that 17% to 24% of public safety dispatchers have symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. According to a June 2023 study in the Journal of Safety Research, emergency responders accounted for 1% of all suicides from 2015 to 2017.
Chris Schilling works as a bus mechanic by day and has been chief of the Westside Volunteer Fire Department in St. Albans for 10 years. He's been a volunteer firefighter for more than 30 years. Schilling called the proposal to add mental health services “great.” He said the job is demanding and firefighters never know what they'll encounter in the field.
“Some people have never seen what we've seen,” he said. “This job isn't for everyone. Everyone deals with death differently.”
Kanawha County Metro 911 Director John Rutherford said the types of calls dispatchers handle impact them and the deputies who respond to them. The department currently has mental health services, including psychiatrists, a critical incident stress management team and a local chaplain who speaks with employees after critical incidents. The Overwatch program would be a welcome addition, he said.
He said the job of a dispatcher can be very stressful: one minute he's walking callers through CPR on someone having a heart attack or in cardiac arrest, and the next he's fielding calls about a shooting or a police pursuit.
“You get stress call after stress call, sometimes with no known outcome,” Rutherford said, “and it just adds up. For lack of a better word, people just need an outlet, to talk to somebody about these experiences. We do a good job administratively, but sometimes they just need someone to listen, someone new, someone to give them a different perspective on things.”
Officials said the Overwatch program is not intended to address personal issues, but rather to help deal with workplace stress.
Wheeler said the cost of the contract is still being calculated, but county officials hope to fund the program with money from the county's public safety tax.
The county will likely start it as a pilot program lasting three to six months.
“We'll see how it works,” Wheeler said, “and once we know if the paramedics are happy with it, we'll continue to grow with the system from that point on.”
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