spenac

the piece of paper doesn't make the professional. we need to quite acting like ambulance drivers and act professional including training our patients. if i was required to attend a 2 year college i would be unable to attend. no college in the area and i have to support my family. i am currently working on advancing to next level. if ever this happens the rural areas will suffer because people that leave for training will stay gone because they can receive better pay in citys.

There is no other service here, nearest mutual aid is 60 miles away. There are only 4 full time medics (1 paramedic, 1 intermediate, 1 basic, 1 eca ), 1 part timer (1 24 hr shift/week), and 1 seasonal part timer ( 2 24hr shifts/wk over course of 4 months), and can't get volunteers as they don't want to miss that much work. Wish we had more people and at least 1 more ambulance but the city will not spend the money. One of these days one of the familys that have someone die while we're gone will sue and get lots of money. The state of Texas recommended two ambulances, each staffed by the equivalent of 6 full timers and 2 part timers. Other experts have recommended we have a third ambulance available as well. Can't get the state to require the changes so everyone suffers. But hey ambulance losses money as most here live at or below poverty, are illegal, or have medicaid and think that covers them so when they get the bill don't pay. As long as don't make money city refuses to pay to improve it, but when one of the city's big wigs loses someone when we're already out they'll blame us and still not fix it. :-({|= Now don't get me wrong we keep working with what we have because we love to help people but the areas growing and if we don't grow with it we'll all be burned out. I'll get off soap box now. I realize all ems needs to improve. Have a great day.

Our nearest hospital is 90 miles from our station. Many of our calls require us to go about an hour to reach the scene then travel back to our community then turn and head the 90 miles to the nearest hospital. Air support whats that? We can reach the hospital prior to the nearest air support even getting to the hospital. Some air services say they will come to us but they will have to refuel near the hospital so we usually meet them at the hospital. We run 1 ambulance and average more than 2 calls per day. Average turn around time for a basic run starting near our station is 4 hours. Much more if serious calls or traveling to outer areas, there will be no ambulance in the area for more than 6 hours, been out because of 1 call close to 12 hours, because once reach the small town hospital we sometimes have to continue care there to :-({|= . Nearest mutual aid is 1 hour away, 30 miles from hospital, staffed with 1 ambulance if they're available. Highway is mountains and curvy to hospital. We are about 2000 foot elevation and we get around as high as 5500 foot elevation. Up and down round and run, lots of bumps and ear popping. We got new ambulance end of Dec 06 and have already passed 10000 miles on it. Some medics from the city have tried ride outs and said they couldn't handle the stress of being with serious patients so long in the ambulance. Wrecks we may end up with multiple serious patients on board, but thats life for rural medics. Myself I got lost when I rode a few times at services closer to hospitals, how can you do anything to the patient, in fact many times seems might as well load them and go the 5 minutes to the hospital rather than messing around on scene. I know theres others probably even more rural but many of the posts on here so far don't sound to hard to deal with the distance