A History of Spring River Paramedic Ambulance Service

By 1974, Cherokee Village was approaching 20 years of existence, with a population of about 2,000 residents. Many of the Village’s residents were from populated areas where rapid, professional emergency services were considered a fact of life. Although Cherokee Village’s fire department had been founded several years earlier, the residents of this area depended on services from outside the area, or even funeral homes, for their emergency medical needs.

Modern emergency medical services, of the type we appreciate today, had its beginnings in the 1960’s. At that time, the level of EMS response could vary widely from place to place, and some larger cities had emergency medical services better than that found in rural areas. By 1974 several of the community’s residents had recognized the need for ambulance service in this area. As stated in February 1985 Cherokee Villager article, in October of 1974, “12 people were appointed by Desiree Meyer, President of the P. O. A., and charged with the task of organizing an ambulance service.”

Cherokee Village Ambulance Service was incorporated in January 1975, and began operations in March. Fourteen thousand dollars was available from fund raising efforts to purchase the service’s first fully equipped ambulance. A second ambulance was purchased in the service’s second year to cover when the first unit was on call, and in 1976, the Quorum Court contributed $2,000 for the services to cover the north half of Sharp County. 

In the beginning, the Cherokee Village Ambulance Service answered about 15 calls per month. By the mid-1980’s about 50 to 60 calls per month were typical. The service now responds to about 350 calls per month.

The original volunteer crews were dispatched by telephone, and typically were on duty for a week at a time. Later volunteer crews, (which usually consisted of a driver and either two basic EMT’s or an EMT and a first responder) would be on duty for 48 hours at a time and were dispatched by radio pagers. Well over 300 people served as volunteers over the service’s first 20 years of operation.

Training has always been an important aspect of the service’s operation. The first EMT class in Arkansas was taught in Ash Flat in 1974. Since then, around 25 EMT classes of various levels have been taught, scores of CPR classes have been held for both service members and the public and many hundreds of hours of continuing education classes have been conducted for the Service’s medical personnel.

Many important milestones have been reached over the Service’s forty seven years of operation. In 1991, CVAS became an Enhanced Basic Life Support Service, which allowed crew members to use electrical defibrillation for patients in cardiac arrest. Two years later the Service upgraded to an Intermediate level license which allowed EMT’s to provide IV therapy to patients. The final upgrade came in 1995 when the Service became a fully paid service at the Paramedic level, the highest level of license generally available to ambulance services in the state. All of these steps required ever increasing levels of training for crew members, and were in part motivated by the need to provide advanced level care when transferring patients from the local hospital to more distant medical facilities. Also in 1991, Cherokee Village Ambulance Service was honored as Ambulance Service of the Year for the state of Arkansas, and the next year was named national EMS Service of the Year.

Although Cherokee Village Ambulance Service has provided service to much of the north part of Sharp County since very early in its history, in 1999 a name change to Spring River Paramedic Ambulance Service officially recognized the service’s regional nature.

In 1997 the ambulance service portion of the Ozark Acres Fire Department and Ambulance Service was consolidated with Cherokee Village Ambulance Service, and until 2006 SRPAS had operated two stations, one known as “The Pines” at the intersection of Iroquois and Allegheny in Cherokee Village, and the other located near the fire station in Ozark Acres. In July 2006, SRPAS began covering the area formerly served by Life Care EMS of Cave City, thus expanding its area to include all of Sharp County. A third station was added at that time, located between Evening Shade and Cave City.

In 2006, our local hospital closed its doors. The next several years were a rough time for our service. In 2013, our fleet was worn out, we were deeply in debt, and the employees had not received a raise in almost 7 years. In 2013, our board of directors were faced with a hard decision, change the way we do business, or close the doors. After a long, exhausting series of events, many changes were made.

Over the next year, we began re-building our services. We purchased 7 units, building our fleet to 8 ALS units total. We focused on paying off debt, while implementing new, more up to date equipment, policies and procedures.

In 2014, White River medical center opened the first satellite ER in Arkansas in the heart of our county. It is known to us as MCED (Medical Complex Emergency Department). The opening of this facility has not only been a positive for the residents of our coverage area, but also for our service. This has greatly changed the type and volume of calls that we respond to.  Healthcare in our county has greatly improved with the introduction of MCED.

In April of 2015 after serving on the board of directors at Spring River Ambulance since 2010 and volunteering as acting General Manager since 2013, Bart Schulz- NREMT was hired as full time General Manager of Spring River Paramedic Ambulance. Bart Schulz is still serving in this position today.

In the year 2016, our crews not only had far better equipment, ambulances and uniform allowances, but also received substantial raises for the first time in many years. The establishment of a new pay structure has created consistent reoccurring pay increases to honor years of service and commitment to Spring River and our community. The crews are also honored with a bonus system that rewards them for all the hard work that they do. Since July 2016, we have had 3 or 4 ALS crews and at times a BLS crew. Our system has become very versatile and is able to adapt in accordance with the needs within our community. Our crews have been strategically based throughout the county, with bases in Hardy, Cherokee Village, Ash Flat and Cave City. This is in an effort to serve our community in the best way possible and reduce time-to-patient. We have also forged strong working relationships with the services in our surrounding areas, such as Vital Link, Pro Med and Fulton County EMS.

In the spring of 2021, our Cave City base moved to a new location, in the back of the old Cave City bank building. All bases except the Pines, which was purchased by Spring River in 2006, are donated by cities or businesses within the communities we serve.