2020-04-16

KVRS members have been extremely busy adapting to the COVID-19 pandemic. Fortunately we have a relatively good inventory of PPE. Our members have been learning and adapting to frequent and major changes in clinical protocols and operational guidelines as the outbreak has progressed. Our volunteers have not shied away from their duty obligations and are still staffing ambulances continuously. We are definitely seeing COVID-19 in the community. Our overall call volume has actually been down about 30%, but we are seeing critically sick patients more often.

We realize that many of our supporters are financially stressed, and we will be delaying our Spring fund drive. We have always been disciplined about maintaining contingency funds to get us through short periods of unexpected community hardship, but that will only go so far. It will not be long before we'll have to ask you to be there for us so that we can be there for you.

In the meantime, some industrious community members are helping us in brand new ways, like donating their stashes of PPE or 3-D printing new PPE for us. We are accepting such donations via the city's Volunteer Resources Office (VRO). Please contact the VRO at volunteer@vbgov.com or 757-385-4722 if you'd like to help.

2019-06-04

Our Spring direct mail fund drive is in progress.  Please donate!

2017-04-26

Our Life Member, past vice president, and long-time capital grant coordinator, Paramedic Jim Brewer, has received this year's Hampton Roads Volunteer Achievement Award in the Individual Adult category!  This award recognizes the region's most outstanding volunteers based on their length of service, initiative and impact on the community.  Among many other things, Jim's impact includes winning grants for the squad that have allowed the squad to deploy about $1,000,000 worth of apparatus and gear over time!

2017-03-03

Our top 500 donors are receiving copies of the Rescue Lines newsletter in the coming week. Our hope is to keep members of our community apprised of how our system is performing and improving. If resources allowed, we'd be sending it to every mailbox in our entire service area, but 500 is what we have on hand at the moment.

2017-02-15

We now have video laryngoscopes for all six of the ambulances in our fleet!  This is important because sometimes we must insert a breathing tube into a patient's windpipe. We must be able to see the tube go through the patient's vocal cords, and that's not always easy to do with our own eyes. A video laryngoscope literally allows us to see around corners. The part of the tool that opens the patient's airway has a fiber-optic eye on its tip that transmits an image to an external display. Previously, this technology was only available to anesthesiologists in operating rooms. It makes a critical and tricky procedure faster, safer, and easier.  The four devices we just added to our inventory are extremely cost effective at about $2800 each.

McGrath EMS Video Laryngoscope

2017-02-01

Thanks to emergency grants from the state and the city, we've been able to place orders for two brand new ambulances to replace those destroyed by Hurricane Matthew!

2016-12-31

KVRS responded to more than 25 calls per day (transporting more than 17 patients per day) in 2016, average.