Healthcare Heroes: Pinkston and Tilley

Caroline Spears
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There are two members of the Baxter Health family who are being recognized for just being good people and being what is the standard of care that Baxter County has come to expect.

James Pinkston and Roger Tilley have served nearly a cumulative of 50 years with Baxter, with both having beginnings as EMTs and dispatch. Pinkston stepped in the role of patient advocate for the hospital for a while when Director of Paramedic Services Gerald Cantrell, who was over the hospital ambulance services for more than 40 years left the role. Pinkston stepped into that role during the process of finding someone to lead ambulance services.

“Right now, my role is serving as director over the ambulance service,” Pinkston clarified. “We cover Baxter and Marion counties, with five trucks that run in a basic unit  which covers the two counties with about 60,000 people. We have a dispatch center that coordinates with 911.”

Tilley likewise began in dispatch, but ultimately decided to take it a little further.

“After I became an EMT, I then decided to go to paramedic school and received a paramedic position here and have been on the ambulance ever since,” he stated. “We are averaging over 7,000 miles a week, and as James said, try to keep the five ambulances in working order at all times. There are around 14,000 calls a year, so it’s hopping.”

So amidst their incredibly busy schedule, the team still found ways to go beyond the call of duty, and their actions were not unnoticed.

“Roger and I were recently recognized for that; for an elderly lady that lived in town,” Pinkston stated. “She lived in hospice and was close to passing away. She awoke one day to find that her husband had passed away. He had been taking care of her. He wasn’t taking care of himself, focusing more on her. He didn’t make it through.

“She was bed bound and had no way of going to his funeral and services, and family couldn’t get her there, so we offered to take her,” he continued. ”We took her in the ambulance and let her do the visitation and helped her be a part of that, then took her back home.”

He said that the lady was extremely appreciative, but sadly, she passed away shortly after this act was done.

“She had already passed by the time we were given this recognition,” Pinkston explained. “However, we always do as much as we can for people in our community that we know are having problems and need help.”

He explained for a while, the hospital had a program called the Community Paramedic Program, and it was very similar to the home health program, where he and Tilley would visit patients who had a chance of being re-admitted to the hospital.

Over 75 percent of our population is over the age of 65 with chronic conditions and end up being in an out of the hospital,” he said, “So if we could keep that number down, we can treat them at their home and not have to get the trucks out or get their family to bring them in.”

Pinkston and Tilley agreed that they were surprised at receiving this recognition because they stated that their roles and how they serve the community is done without any thought, and that compassion is something that comes with the job.

“It’s about treating them the way you would want yourself or your family to be treated,” Pinkston said, and that compassion is especially important during crises such as the flooding and tornadoes back in May.

“That morning we started paging out … we have the ability to page from our dispatch computer every employee’s phone and can do that through the whole hospital, but basically we paged out and explained that this is a disaster response,” Pinkston said of the morning the tornadoes hit the Briarcliff area. “We literally had every truck we own out searching the areas.”

During the flood that occurred in Yellville, a nursing home was victim to rising water and Pinkston and Tilley were dispatched there to assist in rescue efforts.

“We transported the patients from that nursing home to other nursing facilities around Harrison which were in conjunction with that nursing home that got flooded,” he said. “It’s basically a community effort, and we all have to work together to ensure the safety of the community.”