Thoughts on Fire vs Private vs 3rd Service Organizations

[Niftymedi911]

I work for a 3rd service and there are obvious problems and there is also very good feedbacks from people. Most of the fire-based agencies in the county are ALS non-transport. With tax cuts here in Fla. everyone's trying to justify their budget. The FD's want to take over transport. They argue that it's their due right to transport. But in reality, they want, want, want but never can justify the want. They all view EMS as a cash cow. Just as much as 3rd services do inter facility transfers, there cash cows and easy, guaranteed money. There is 1 private service, where all the medics and EMT's who cannot get hired on with us go. They do the NET's (non emergency transfers) to MD's offices etc. We do all of the ALS/BLS hospital to hospital, long distance or within Lee County transfers.

A majority of (78%) the fire/medics who work for the 17 ALS FD's have actually come from the county run service. They're all skilled, highly trained. We do get along with everyone fine with the exception of Cape Coral Fire/Rescue. They build fire stations and raise the rent for EMS to house a truck (close to 5k more just because) just because they know that the response is needed in that area. They continually try to stir problems with us. They have they're own dispatch center, separate from the county's so delay in dispatching an ambulance relies on if the communication dispatcher forgets to call our dispatch for an ambulance. ( It has happened many times before and we get the blame for not responding fast enough).

We're the sole 9-1-1 ALS transport provider of Lee County with a population of 650,000 full time residents and over 3 million during snowbird season. Call volume for 2006 was 74,996 and in 2007 we're getting close to be around 80,000. Average call volume per 24 hour truck is anywhere from 5-10 per shift. Busiest units run from 10-20 calls per shift. We have at this time 28, 24 hour trucks and 6 12 hour peak load trucks. Bene's are second to none, I'm in for 25 years and retire from the FRS with 85% for the rest of my life. Which by the way I'll be retiring at 43 with 3 retirement funds . Medical, dental, vision 100% paid for with prescription drug coverage, 12 paid holidays, PTO, sick and vacation leave etc. Salaries are nothing to sneeze at either.

The big problem with our agency are the old timers who do not like change and want to hold our agency back. There are not a lot of ways to promote besides the typical ladder from EMT>Medic>FTO>Lt.>Captain>Chief>Director. Our shift captains continually are biased who they give OT assignments to. Admin is always looking for new ways to try and show the road crews that they're not doing a good enough job. example: Performance indicators ( offload times, response times, PCR uploading and compliance, Skill evals). they spend too much time running on tax payers expense everywhere else in the country for "new ideas", without fixing the ones already arising.