Response times are records, too

Wednesday's editorial asserts the right of the public to know how emergency services are performing:

On a late October evening last year, 33-year-old Brian Lanese of Bluffton was having a cookout in his backyard when three masked teens showed up,  apparently at random, and severely beat him.

The savagery of the attack reverberated for days, both within Beaufort County and around the state, but local concerns about the violence have been eclipsed over the past year by the treatment received at the scene by the wounded man.

In the first days after the attack, while Lanese remained in a coma, his loved ones spoke openly about the egregious conduct of the Beaufort County-run Emergency Medical Services paramedics, making accusations that would later be supported by a state Department of Health and Environmental Control investigation that sanctioned the paramedics for being unprofessional. Lanese's medical records suggested they underestimated the extent of his injuries, initially attempting to take him to a local hospital with no trauma center instead of a better-equipped facility in nearby Savannah.

Widespread concern that the case might represent a larger pattern provoked The Beaufort Gazette (a sister newspaper of The Sun News within The McClatchy Co.) to try to review the county's response times and practices in similar emergencies, but the newspaper met a sadly predictable fate. Retreating to the defensive, Beaufort County officials denied the newspaper's requests for the data, arguing that the county's own internal reviews were sufficient and that state laws shielded them from releasing the data.

To make matters worse, S.C. Attorney General Henry McMaster's office issued an opinion defending Beaufort County on the basis of a 2004 law that essentially shields any information about paramedic calls from public view in a policy far more restrictive than federal laws protecting patient privacy.

The state law, the opinion said, ``protects all data, including response times, trip numbers, requests for helicopter transport by numbers and dates, and other general raw data compiled from day to day operations of our emergency services department.''

The 2004 law was sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Harvey Peeler, a Gaffney Republican who chairs the Senate Medical Affairs Committee.Peeler has since said that DHEC actually drafted the bill, and that he sponsored it because he thought its intent was to bring state law into accordance with federal law -- not to surpass it.

Accordingly, Peeler has said he plans to rewrite the law for the next legislative session so that it can no longer be abused by secretive local departments.

A handful of local state lawmakers from the Beaufort County area -- Sen. Tom Davis and Reps. Bill Herbkersman, Richard Chalk and Shannon Erickson -- have endorsed the effort, and we hope the Grand Strand's coalition will be next to join them.

Brian Lanese's suffering may have been a symptom of a disease in Beaufort County's emergency-response system, and The Beaufort Gazette made a commendable effort to diagnose it. In the process, the newspaper discovered a significant flaw in our state's public-records laws that it is now up to the legislature to remedy: The public should always have the right to check the health of its ambulance services -- a vital organ in any community.

To make matters worse, S.C. Attorney General Henry McMaster's office issued an opinion defending Beaufort County on the basis of a 2004 law that essentially shields any information about paramedic calls from public view in a policy far more restrictive than federal laws protecting patient privacy.

The state law, the opinion said, ``protects all data, including response times, trip numbers, requests for helicopter transport by numbers and dates, and other general raw data compiled from day to day operations of our emergency services department.''

The 2004 law was sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Harvey Peeler, a Gaffney Republican who chairs the Senate Medical Affairs Committee.Peeler has since said that DHEC actually drafted the bill, and that he sponsored it because he thought its intent was to bring state law into accordance with federal law -- not to surpass it.

Accordingly, Peeler has said he plans to rewrite the law for the next legislative session so that it can no longer be abused by secretive local departments.

A handful of local state lawmakers from the Beaufort County area -- Sen. Tom Davis and Reps. Bill Herbkersman, Richard Chalk and Shannon Erickson -- have endorsed the effort, and we hope the Grand Strand's coalition will be next to join them.

Brian Lanese's suffering may have been a symptom of a disease in Beaufort County's emergency-response system, and The Beaufort Gazette made a commendable effort to diagnose it. In the process, the newspaper discovered a significant flaw in our state's public-records laws that it is now up to the legislature to remedy: The public should always have the right to check the health of its ambulance services -- a vital organ in any community.