The problem with Rural EMS

[sirduke]

Ahhhh, thats thats what I thought, the cost of living offsets the higher pay, so I guess I'll have to pass.

Thanks for the invite though.

[CTXMEDIC]

I am curious though...One person works 24/72 another 24/48. I am assuming that you are paid full time hours for this. If I were to work these shifts I would make an annual salary of $54,750 and $73,200 respectively. Is this in the ball park of where you are at?

I wish. the way our schedule works is a 48hr work week. i aint gonna lie, i pull down about 50-55K a year unless i really rack up the overtime. im a county employee and our benefit package rocks. we have great medical direction and CE, alot of opportunities to do other stuff like swift water and confined space rescue, tactical medic, academy instructor, FTO, etc. its a good gig but we be busy.

[CTXMEDIC]

Maybe your friends are impressed by your stories of "having slept on the couch all night at the station". I'm not. I bust my ass day in and day out to be damn certain our members are current and up to date. The only reason why we lag behind is because our smaller communities do not have the budget to equip us with all the new toys. We need to PROVE it for a few years.

I'll stack our squad against any in the country. Paid or not.

Im a good medic! I am I am I am! :roll:

[akroeze]

EMS should NOT be based on economic gains! We are an essential service and emergencies happen 24/7 therefore crews should be ready to respond 24/7.

[CTXMEDIC]

i agree to an extent. without profit there woud be no advancement. when profit becomes the solitary goal is when i have a problem.

[Mateo_1387]

Mateo, thanks for your input. It is very interesting information. Out here there are 113 ambulance services, only 11 of them have staff at the base 24/7. The smallest of these does 1200 calls a month. Any organisation must balance economic viability with efficiency. If we had a budget triple what we currently function at, we might be able to have staff at the base 24/7. Besides, I have yet to see a medical emergency in which the extra few minutes required for us to acquire the ambulance and respond would have made the difference between life and death or morbidity.

How about for the folks who have response times that exceed 30 min. I could see it being time sensitive.

[Arctickat]

Why? What difference does it make if it's 30 min or 33 min? Some of our responses are over 30 minutes and if the patient survives for 30 minutes, I suspect they'll make it for an extra three or four. The human body is not so fragile as one might think. For this reason emergency L/S responses are being down played and used less and less frequently. Time is simply not that much of an issue anymore now that we can bring the treatment to the patient rather than be a meat wagon.

[EMTChris]

I would like to apologize to everyone here for my rant. It was indeed unprofessional for me to do so. I just happened to fall upon this topic during a time when I was in a heated dispute with a local paid agency (a dispute in which I briefly touched on), and the timing was all wrong.

I can assure you that as a rural EMS volunteer agency, we do strive to provide "paid level service" at the volunteer level. Our agency has the largest district in the county (possibly the state). We had 560 calls last year, and our average response time is 4.12 minutes (AVERAGE FOR 2008). I recently read an article that professional paid agencies average response (tone out to roll out) is roughly 5 minutes, rural volunteer is closer to 10 minutes. In this regard we are well above average, and I can assure you our level of care is also.

With few exceptions of individual members of local paid agencies which provide limited mutual aide to our district, the paid agencies in my area are the most unprofessional I have ever encountered, and recently, it has been a lot worse.

[spenac]

We are very rural. At my primary station that sees less than 200 calls a year our tone to out the door is 90 seconds or less. We are paid to be here and we respond fast when they call. It is our responsibility to be there and be professional.