Down time-Station or Home?

[coolparamedic]

At my service, every two weeks we sign up for call. The shifts are 0900-2100 & 2100-0900. I work for an ALS service where the paramedics stay at the station. The emt's stay at home if their total time of page to enroute is 5 min or less on the paramedic unit. If you are on second call (the 2nd out ambulane staffed with an EMT-I and you don't have to be in uniform but you still have to be able to get to the station in 5 mins in the event of a second call. (Keep in mind the service does 2 calls a day)

[spenac]

we respond from our homes. city does it this way to avoid paying overtime or hiring more medics. we're paid for 16 of 24 hours on duty. we're a rural fairly busy service.

[GBFDEMS174]

The Fire-EMS service I volunteer for is considered on-call we just have to live within 5 miles of the station

[iMac]

It all depended on what service I worked for. Some services I would respond from home and others I would stay at the hall btu for the most part unless I worked for a large city I would always respond from home.

[Retread]

As a vollie I can run from home on call or do station time.

[jmp6753]

We are a small rural agency. We staff one ALS unit at all times (EMT and Paramedic in the station 24/7) and one BLS/ILS unit with on-call staff. The on-call staff have to live or be within 5 mins of the station when a call is received. If they live further away, they have to stay at the station. They receive a stand-by rate of pay which increases to a full hourly rate once a call is received until all paperwork is done and the rig is restocked.

The difficult part of this set up is that the community has about 3500-4000 people in town. Finding EMT's is difficult enough and we try to do a basic class annually but the pool to pick from is pretty shallow. I have 8 on-call EMT's and the fire dept has about 4. Unfortunately, we can not staff the BLS/ILS unit all the time.

[firedoc5]

For five years the station was my home. There would be between 3-5 full timers that lived in one bunk room. Got a little cramped every now and then. Eventually I was able to move into the apartment above the ambulance building with one of the other guys. Frequently the apt. was a place for the others to hang out instead of the living quarters back down stairs. It could be a lot of fun. But eventually that even became old. Even on your "days off" you were too available at anytime. When we tried to draw the line of when we weren't suppose to be working the boss reminded us all the time of how we were living in the apt. for free and that was our way of paying rent.

[stcommodore]

I'm glad I don't leave anywhere near the departments like this! Plenty of the squads in southeast pa have slow days where you might get 1-3 calls, heck thats probaby the average for some departments but they are staffed. Long gone are the days of responding from home like some silly volly fire house.

[dougd]

We also don't get paid very much at all ($80/24hr) and to be considered full time you have to work 96hrs a week.

You have to work 96 hours a week to be considered full-time? Don't they have labor laws in OK?

[bpmedic4]

The thing I find bizarre is that you don't all take a unit home with you! I work 7 days straight and on-call at night so essentially 24/7 but all services in Australia take the units home with them when they are on call. If there are 2 of you on call then you take a unit each and meet at the job or somewhere on the way, park one of the units and pick it up later. That way you can have a normal life, go to the shops, pool, beach whatever as long as you park the unit close by.

Most U.S. services only have 1 or 2 ambulances at each station, and in order for them to roll to a call or going emergency traffic, they must have a crew of 2 licensed technicians on board, so it makes it hard to take a unit home with you, and if I'm not mistaken, our units are quite a bit different than Australian units, in that they are much bigger, and are usually diesels making the fuel cost even higher...