When responding to a call, paramedic Thomas Barrett, 44, protects himself with a face mask if he encounters a patient coughing and sneezing. So it was a no-brainer to get vaccinated against the H1N1 swine flu yesterday. The Richmond Ambulance Authority employee followed registered nurse Jatori Robinson’s instructions to sniff after she squirted vaccine up each of his nostrils yesterday.

Chip Decker has been named interim CEO of the Richmond Ambulance Authority. The authority’s board said yesterday that Decker, who has been the chief operating officer since November 2007, was chosen unanimously to replace Jerry Overton. Overton, the authority’s leader since 1991, announced his resignation in February to lead California-based Road Safety International Inc., which produces “black-box” monitoring systems used in emergency vehicles and a safe-driving program.

In 1991, when Jerry Overton took over the Richmond Ambulance Authority, from 3 percent to 4 percent of people who went into cardiac arrest outside a hospital in Richmond survived. Today, that number is 35 percent. Overton has presided over a period of positive change in his time as chief executive officer of the authority. One of the nation’s busiest emergency medical systems per capita, the ambulance authority transported more than 40,000 patients last year.

The Richmond Ambulance Authority’s chief executive officer is leaving the post he has held since the city-funded agency’s founding to work for a California safety-products company. Jerry Overton, 59, announced his resignation yesterday to the ambulance authority’s board, which voted to begin appointing a search committee for his replacement. Overton said he plans to assist with the transition over several months and that a specific date for his departure has not been set.

A man faces several charges after police said he drove his pickup truck through an intersection, across a parking lot and smashed into a Richmond Ambulance Authority headquarters building. Juver Alfredi Cruz Machuca, 26, was examined at the scene by ambulance authority personnel before he was taken to VCU Medical Center and then the city lockup after the crash early yesterday morning.

After its first year running the city’s emergency medical-response operations, the Richmond Ambulance Authority says it is doing a better job of meeting required response times.