Trauma Team Tapped for Ford Grant Honor

An unheralded North County team of citizen volunteers who arrive at the scene of a traumatic accident or event within minutes to comfort and help the victims has been nominated for a prestigious Ford Foundation grant for its work.

The 6-year-old Trauma Intervention Program, TIP, has headquarters in Carlsbad and serves the communities of Oceanside, Vista, San Marcos, Fallbrook, Carlsbad, Encinitas, Rancho Santa Fe, Solana Beach and the Camp Pendleton Marine base.

Program volunteers respond to emergency workers’ calls within 20 minutes--taking over after paramedics, police or firefighters have done their work--to aid the victims until neighbors or families arrive.

TIP was named as one of 25 finalists in the Ford Foundation competition, which drew nearly 2,000 entrants, for innovative programs in state and local government. Ten of the finalists will receive $100,000 awards in the competition to be judged by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University on July 12.

Wayne Fortin, director and founder of the low-budget aid program, said about 60 trained volunteers participate in TIP, responding to calls from fire, police, paramedics and emergency room volunteers on a 24-hour, sevem-day-a-week basis.

Fortin, who is a county mental health services worker based in Oceanside, founded the TIP program to help emergency workers faced with stressful situations.

“It’s not the firefighting that causes the stress for firemen. They’ll tell you that firefighting is their job. It’s dealing with the poor woman and her children at the scene. Firefighters don’t have the time or the training for that,” Fortin said.

So a fire dispatcher calls a TIP volunteer who shows up within minutes to comfort victims, making calls for them and finding temporary shelter, if necessary.

“Our calls usually come in in the middle of the night, and we are there for a few hours until neighbors and friends come in and take over,” Fortin said.

TIP volunteers are called in to some high-profile accidents, such as the two-fatality train accident in Del Mar, and crime scenes, such as the recent murder-robbery at an Oceanside El Torito restaurant, Fortin said, but many calls come in for much less newsworthy events.

“An elderly woman wakes up in the morning to find that her husband of 50 years has died during the night. She calls 911, and the dispatcher calls in the TIP volunteer,” Fortin said. “That’s a typical case when the nearest relatives may be in the Los Angeles area, and the woman needs someone there to reassure her, to take the steps that must be taken.”

TIP volunteers are taught to screen unwanted callers and turn them away, to make funeral arrangements, to contact social service agencies and to do the dozen things that a bereaved person cannot think to do.

Fortin said that, if the TIP program is awarded one of the $100,000 grants, he plans to use the funds as seed money “to replicate the program in other parts of the country.” He has already received calls of inquiry from Oregon and other cities in California.

Volunteers are plentiful, Fortin said, “and we try to discourage them with stories of 2 a.m. wake-up calls and the sights of an accident scene.” They serve without pay and must even foot the bill for their own gasoline.

The program survives with modest grants from the participating cities, hospitals, fire districts, Camp Pendleton and the county medical examiner’s office. Last year, Fortin said, the TIP program was operated for about $37,000.

Emergency room personnel at Tri-City Medical Center and trauma centers at Scripps Memorial hospitals in Encinitas and La Jolla also use TIP volunteers.

“We were all geared up to serve Camp Pendleton families during the Persian Gulf War,” Fortin said, “but fortunately the war fizzled out, and we weren’t needed.”

Each call has three beneficiaries, he explained.

“The victim is aided, of course, but so are the emergency personnel, who can turn over the bereaved survivors to a human being well-trained in dealing with their grief. And the volunteer also benefits. Volunteers get a lot of satisfaction out of doing this kind of work, doing something that really makes a difference.”

The hardest part of starting the TIP program was gaining the confidence of the participating police and fire departments, Fortin said.

“Police are trained to keep civilians away from an accident scene, but I sold it to them strictly on the basis of stress reduction. Now they call a volunteer to deal with an accident survivor who is wandering around, not knowing what to do or how to do it.”

During the past year, Fortin said, TIP volunteers have aided in 1,900 cases.

The Ford Foundation awards program is designed to recognize and reward local and state governmental programs that show especially innovative approaches to common public needs. Fortin and Carlsbad Police Chief Robert Vales will go to Harvard next month to make a five-minute pitch to judges on the virtues of the TIP program. Fortin is optimistic that it will be among the winners.

“There is some really tough competition, but I think that we are the only one which deals with human services by human beings,” he said.