'Daily NewsMakers with Jeff Lytle' ... Collier Country ambulance service: Ed Morton

Collier County ambulance services get the whole 30 minutes on this week’s "Naples Daily NewsMakers with Jeff Lytle" program airing this morning at 10 on ABC7.

The director of a model system in Seattle, Jim Fogarty, joins Collier County Medical Director Dr. Robert Tober and North Naples Fire Chief Orly Stolts. Then two civic policy experts, Ed Morton and Janet Vasey, size up what they heard and where the issue goes from here — after the Collier County Commission rejected a referendum on consolidating ambulance and fire services countywide under the Sheriff’s Office.

Highlights are at naplesnews.com/newsmakers.

Here are excerpts:

**********************************************************

NewsMakers: Ed Morton and Janet Vasey

Collier EMS' future is sized up.

Ed Morton

Lytle: What are your impressions of the panel discussion (with Fogarty, Tober and Stolts)?

Morton: Well, I thought it was productive and touched on some of the more critical points. But I think one of the areas that was not highlighted and missed, frankly, by that panel was the criticality of standardization.

What didn’t come through is, you can have a rather disparate group of people. You can have 20 or 30 fire departments; you can have different ALS providers, but if they do not subordinate themselves to a single, standardized medical set of clinical protocols, then ambiguity is dangerous.