Emergency landing
Mark Escott returns to oversee Rice EMS program he founded as a student

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

Dr. Mark Escott took the long way home.

Though the new medical director of Rice’s Emergency Medical Service (EMS) may be a rookie in his post, he’s no stranger. In an extraordinary turn of events, the man who founded Rice EMS as an undergraduate 15 years ago has returned to oversee the program.

Good for us. He nearly ended up in Australia.

	MARK ESCOTT

The ’96 Rice alum and Harris County native took the helm this month and will oversee the training and development of the university’s student corps of emergency medical technicians, which handles campus calls for help 24/7. There was no such service when Escott came to Rice in 1991, and it probably wouldn’t be what it is today without his bullheaded determination.

Lucky for us he’s an Owl at heart. Escott studied medicine at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, and might have stayed Down Under under different circumstances. “We were there for four years, and it was a remarkable experience,” Escott said at Rice this week. “We came back to America because the pay at the time wouldn’t have been enough to live on and cover my medical school loans.”

Escott, his wife, Charity, and their daughter, Adelaide, 7, moved to Hershey, Pa., where he took a residency at Penn State Medical Center. He eventually became chief resident and then an assistant professor. He was also a member of the municipal SWAT team (“My wife hated that”) and medical director for special operations at Penn State Hershey.

Emergency Medical Service
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Escott, 37, was by then a father of two (Andrew, 5, was born in Hershey) and was settling in nicely when the call came from Houston. “I had some discussions a year or so ago with the Houston Fire Department, which offered me a position as a medical director. I wasn’t looking to come back to Houston – Pennsylvania is very nice – but it was an intriguing offer.”

The job didn’t work out, but word got to administrators at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) that Escott was amenable to moving south. “Baylor had contacted me back then and said, ‘If things don’t work out, why don’t you come work for us?’ I wasn’t really interested.”

Another call last December changed his mind, when Baylor told him of plans to start a division of EMS and disaster medicine. “It seemed to be an exciting opportunity to get in on the ground floor” of a program Houston has needed for a long time, he said. Escott is now assistant director of the division and an assistant professor at BCM.

One thing naturally led to another. Escott, who was a religious studies major, with a focus on medical ethics, at Rice, had kept close ties with Rice EMS over the years. He ran into Rice EMS Director Lisa Basgall at a national collegiate EMS conference in Baltimore in February. Escott was there to deliver a lecture, and he told Basgall of his interest in returning as medical director of the Rice service in conjunction with his upcoming Baylor duties.

“There’s no way we could ever have said no,” Basgall said.

At the time, Escott’s predecessor, George Kiss, had recently taken on a new job with Harris Country Emergency Service District 1, which pulled him farther away from campus than his previous post with the Houston Fire Department.

“When I interviewed at Baylor, George came to a dinner they had for me here and said, ‘Hey, how would you like to be the medical director at Rice?’ That really clinched the deal. He was ready to move on, and the timing was perfect.”

Escott expects he’ll spend, on average, eight hours a week working with Rice’s student EMS volunteers, who staff each college and the operation’s headquarters at the Rice University Police Department (RUPD).

He recalled spending an enormous amount of time getting the program going when he came to Rice as a freshman. “I was a sports trainer in high school and volunteered on the ground crew for the Civil Air Patrol,” Escott said. “I’d run into EMTs and was always impressed by their knowledge base, so I took my first EMT class as a senior in high school.

“That got me going. I always wanted to learn more, know more, and didn’t really want to wait until after college for medical school. I wanted to do something then.”

He volunteered as an EMT for Cypress Creek Emergency Medical Services the summer before coming to Rice, so the need for such a service on campus seemed like a no-brainer, he said. Escott and his twin, Mike, also a Rice alum and an EMT (and now a special agent in the Department of State), started talking up the idea with the resident associates and masters of Jones College, where both lived.

“They recommended we talk to the person who coordinated clubs and student activities, who essentially said, ‘No.’ That was the first of many, many times we heard ‘no.’

“Many in the administration felt that because Rice was right across the street from the Texas Medical Center, emergency care could get to campus very quickly,” Escott said. “But they didn’t appreciate that ambulances don’t come from across the street. They come from fire stations throughout the city of Houston.”

Escott and his associates followed up with months of research on incidents at Rice and emergency response times. They eventually broke down resistance and gained the support of RUPD. “We got them to support the concept and guide us through the administration,” he said.

“As an undergraduate, you say to yourself, ‘Well, it’s such a good idea that, obviously, they’re going to accept it without much challenge.’ I had no idea of the kind of complications that would arise.”

Ultimately, with financial and volunteer support from each of the colleges, Rice EMS came into being with the first class of trainees in the fall of 1995. The first save came the next October – seven days after operations began. A woman went into cardiac arrest during a wedding reception at Cohen House. A waitress who’d taken that first EMT class began CPR within seconds of the elderly victim’s collapse and saved her life. Escott stayed on as EMS director for two years after graduation before moving to Australia.

Rice EMS now handles an average of two calls a day and 600 a year. Escott is paged every time there’s a call on campus. He doesn’t have to see every chart, but he expects to review all calls that involve airway management because they tend to be more challenging.

Escott expects student EMTs to be involved in quality improvement also. “We want them to reflect on calls and present justifications for what they did to educate the other EMTs. That self-reflection establishes a lifelong habit that’s necessary for EMTs, for nurses and for physicians,” he said. The students are also required to take a shift or two a month with one of several public EMS agencies.

Escott would like to grow the Rice program in several ways, starting with stronger ties between Rice and Baylor. “I and we as a department (at BCM) would like to be more involved here,” he said. “We’d like to offer course work for undergraduates beyond the basic and intermediate EMT classes we have now; we have lots of subject-matter experts in EMS, disaster, international medicine and business, and we can create new partnerships.”

He’d also like to see Rice acquire an ambulance of its own, which he feels would improve response times during hurricanes and other major incidents that can strain the city’s systems.

Rice Police Chief Bill Taylor knows he’s in for an earful from both Escott and Basgall. “He’s going to push us,” Taylor said. “And that’ll be good. We have an EMS director (Basgall) who is of the same mind and is ready to work with him in lockstep to do those things, and they’re going to make my life crazy.”

Taylor welcomes the intrusion. “It’s just unbelievable to have a founder leave, improve himself, move along on his career path and get to the point where he has the credentials to come back and serve as medical director for the organization that he put together 15 years ago.”

As if he didn’t have enough to do, Escott said he’s talking with Rice Athletics about serving as a team doctor, if he has time between Rice EMS, teaching at Baylor, clinical obligations in the emergency room at Ben Taub General Hospital, his renewed work as associate medical director of Cypress Creek EMS – and raising a family.

That would be another full-circle moment, as both Escott and his brother attended Rice on scholarships they earned as sports trainers. Mark worked 20 hours a week throughout his college career with the football, baseball and track teams.

“Rice has been good to me, and I hope I can repay it by making it even better,” Escott said. “It’s good to be back.”