When in crisis, Orange calls ‘Batman and Robin’
Pair solve county’s health challenges
Orange County Mayor Teresa Jacobs calls them Batman and Robin.
When county leaders summon Dr. George Ralls and Dr. Chris Hunter, trouble’s usually afoot.
Name a public health threat in Orange County, from a heroin epidemic to Zika, and Ralls, Hunter or both swing into action.
“They’re our unsung heroes,” Jacobs said of the duo, both county administrators and emergency medicine physicians who work weekly shifts at Orlando Regional Medical Center’s emergency room.
They bring an ER doctor’s approach to solving Orange’s public health challenges, which include managing one of the largest emergency medical services in the nation.
“They’re both wicked smart,” said Jay Falk, academic chairman of ORMC’s emergency medicine department, where Ralls and Hunter trained. Ralls, 52, who attended medical
school at the University of Miami while a full-time firefighter/paramedic, was hired in 2001 as associate medical director of Orange County EMS. He was bumped up to deputy county administrator in 2014.
Hunter, 39, followed in Ralls’ footsteps as EMS medical director in 2011. He was named director of health services in 2014, overseeing a demanding department that includes the animal shelter and health services at the county jail.
Hunter decided last month to shed some of his governmental responsibilities to focus more on medical research and teach in ORMC’s Emergency Medicine Residency program. He will remain involved with Orange County EMS and help Ralls whenever he calls.
Ralls said he’s not likely to search for a replacement because Hunter “set the bar really high.”
“He’s nobody’s sidekick,” Ralls said.
Their dual roles as county administrators and doctors may appear to be too much to shoulder for some.
“It seems like it would be a pain in the rump to do this,” Ralls said. “But the jobs make perfect sense to us, they actually complement one another.”
He and Hunter, for instance, didn’t need a crash course on Zika, which threatened tourism-dependent Central Florida last summer. They knew all about viruses spread by mosquito bites.
“It wasn’t some newfangled thing to us,” said Hunter, 39, who appeared in a public service video to show citizens how they could help thwart the spread of Zika, linked to severe birth defects.
In the ER, they answer questions that might befuddle other doctors. They can explain to an HIV-positive patient how to access government health benefits through the Ryan White Program or outline Animal Services quarantine procedures to a dogbite patient.
They know many county paramedics by name.
“If there’s a problem, we hear it,” Ralls said.
Both served on the mayor’s prescription-drug task force, which was assembled after fatal overdoses of heroin and other potent street drugs spiked in 2015, killing 84 people in Orange.
“For us, the problem was obvious and real,” Ralls said. “We didn’t just hear about it, we were seeing it … resuscitating these folks, sitting with their families, trying to understand what was happening.”
Ralls and Hunter pushed to equip police and paramedics in the county with naloxone. The drug, administered by injection or through a nasal spray, instantly reverses the deadly effects of heroin, giving doctors a chance to save a victim’s life.
Hunter used his medical license to issue a standing prescription order for first responders and filmed training videos showing them how to use it.
Their dual roles don’t always fit so neatly.
On June 12, they collided at Pulse.
Both doctors, who had worked weekend ER shifts, felt pulled to ORMC’s trauma center, where the dead and dying filled operating rooms and hallways, but public duties took them to the nightclub. They put on body armor. “Our hope was we wouldn’t miss an opportunity to find somebody [alive] in there … somebody waiting for someone to come get them out,” Ralls said.
Strobe lights were flashing when they went in.
“The way people were laying, it was just so obvious — they didn’t have a chance to even take a step,” Ralls said. “Some went down where they had stood. Others were on the floor holding onto one another as if they had been dancing.” No one was alive. He and Hunter helped Medical Examiner Joshua Stephany carry the first bodies from the club.
As that day wore on, Ralls and Hunter tried to help worried families reunite with loved ones, whether alive or dead. Even for ER doctors accustomed to delivering bad news, the chore was heavy.
“As much as we think we’re hard as nails, we all have our limits,” Ralls said.
“They’re [Ralls and Hunter] our unsung heroes.” Orange County Mayor Teresa Jacobs