steve-in-kville

Why is it, on a Holiday weekend, your volly EMS squad is out of service because everyone is at the cabin/beach/Las Vegas/relatives/etc.... until you get a greasy horse-n-buggy vs. a semi-truck.... then the ambulance *suddenly* has a crew of 5 and six more show up on the scene??!! HUH??!! SOMEONE TELL ME WHY!!! steve P.S. Answer: they're all a bunch of wackers!!

Reading some of the past threads in regards to the various EMS services represented here (paid and volunteer), I am curious how your service(s) are structured. Our "premier" paid service in our county has a director, chief, deputy chief, and about 4 supervisors. All those positions must be filled by a medic. The director rarely works a shift on a truck, the chief and deputy fill in as every once and again, and the supervisors fill in where ever they're needed, typically on a MICU or they run the squad (also called a ALS chase vehicle, depending where you're from). On real greasy calls, the "sup" responds out to assist whatever truck may need a hand ALS-wise (codes, crashes, etc). This service keeps between 8-10 trucks in service at any given time. Most of our volly's in the area have a chief, deputy, maybe an assistant and/or captains, etc. The various chiefs typically have various office/administrative responsibilities while the lesser line officers fill spots of driver training, precepting the probies, truck maintenance, etc. Again, as with the paid services, one of the chiefs may respond on the greasy stuff to assist the on-duty crew. Most of our volly services have at least one truck in service at all times, one larger volly service often has two trucks, as well as a QRS or something to that nature. What about your service? How is it structured? Thoughts on improvements? steve

I've done the paid gigs already, but I'm a volly at heart. At any rate, I am pushing to reorginize our crew rotation/schedule at the service I volunteer with. We currently have five crews (driver, EMT, plus whatever probationary/underage/ride-along we have to spare). Each crew rotates the nights (1800-0600) they are on call during the week, and each crew has every 5th weekend on call. For example, lets say I'm on call this Wednesday night; next week its Tuesday night; next week its Monday night... and then I have the following entire weekend. The following week I start at Friday night and so on. This works out okay until we get to the weekends... everyone likes the crew rotation, but having to be on call for the whole weekend is a bummer. Each crew member is responsible to find coverage if he cannot run and the crew chief of each crew is responsible to make sure he/she has two people to staff a truck. We are the only volly EMS service in our area that has designated crew assignments for the evenings, whereas our daytime crews are sign-up only (90% of the daytime is covered). Just for my own curiosity, what kind of schedule or crew system does your service use? Thanks- steve

Having been through this situation of rural vs. city, I shall add my two cents. I was volunteer with a small town service that maybe ran 120 calls per year. When I moved, the volly service there ran about 350 to 400 (sometimes more) calls per year. I went to work for our nearest city EMS and was catapluted from a single-truck service to a paid service with a dozen trucks running 911 calls plus a few that did transports and wheelchair runs. I went from writing 30-50 calls a year to 5 or more per 8-hour shift. Lets just say I learned more in one year than I did the previous 8 years as a volly!! steve