velcroMedic1987

IT'S WINTER IN THE NORTHEAST!!!
IT'S GOING TO SNOW!!!
Everybody needs to get over it and stop buying all the toilet paper!!!

IT'S WINTER IN THE NORTHEAST!!!
IT'S GOING TO SNOW!!!
Everybody needs to get over it and stop buying all the toilet paper!!!

Here's my experience with staffing levels. Worked in Syracuse, NY back in the 1990s and 2000s. City of 100000 or so. Daytime EMS including transfers was a max of 10. Unit hour utilization was tracked meticulously. Night time was 4 ambulances over night. That was usually enough.
Where I work now, I'm in a town of 35k. We have one ambulance staffed and cross staff three others. We get mutual aid in very infrequently, maybe once a week.
Mt. Pleasant is the same geographic size about - 35 square miles. So, five dedicated BLS trucks seems a bit much. Probably do it with three. Depends what benchmarks for response time you want to hit, and how much to spend. I bet you could do it with three trucks and one ALS unit if you triaged a good number of calls down to BLS or AEMT level.
There are formulas for this. If you want service at your door in four minutes or less 90 % of the time, add more trucks and stations. It's not rocket science. The city of Syracuse (Fire, not ambulance) has their stations arranged to be anywhere in the city in four minutes. For a city of 100k that's 10 stations. EMS does system status management to position units to be on scene within 8 minutes 90 percent of the time.

Does anyone on here know FACTUALLY (not asking for opinions) how many active interior qualified volunteers are on the current roster in Rye?

That's absolutely scary! So they have 3 career guys and rely on the Volunteers who are barely existent, as it sounds from reading these posts. That sounds like the right equation for a bad event to happen. I know these cities, towns, and villages hate giving money to emergency services but this is absolutely ridiculous. Why does it always have to be till someone gets severely hurt or killed for someone to do anything.

I would love to see a "summit" of all the EMS agencies in the county where the system is discussed and opportunities for improvement are discussed and a long-term plan for an EMS System in Westchester County is discussed. We are so badly compartmentalized that this has never happened.

Are we really going to start talking politics here?

Aren't there enough other forums covering this nonsense?

Please don't ever come to treat me or my family with that attitude. "EDP" calls can be drug related, diabetic emergencies, and even if "just" a mental illness they deserve the same level of care as anyone else.
To dismiss a call based on dispatch information is very irresponsible.

Are we really going to start talking politics here?

Aren't there enough other forums covering this nonsense?

Please don't ever come to treat me or my family with that attitude. "EDP" calls can be drug related, diabetic emergencies, and even if "just" a mental illness they deserve the same level of care as anyone else.
To dismiss a call based on dispatch information is very irresponsible.

Please don't ever come to treat me or my family with that attitude. "EDP" calls can be drug related, diabetic emergencies, and even if "just" a mental illness they deserve the same level of care as anyone else.
To dismiss a call based on dispatch information is very irresponsible.

Are we really going to start talking politics here?

Aren't there enough other forums covering this nonsense?

Are we really going to start talking politics here?

Aren't there enough other forums covering this nonsense?

Affiliated and NY Ambulance were offshoots of an ambulette company. There weren't EMS professionals running it and their focus was solely on one thing... $$$$. Affiliated came in and low bid the contracts taking both NR and MV until they screwed things up badly enough that they lost them in both cases to Empress, IIRC. I believe NR fell first and MV followed. Ironically the owners were ultimately convicted of fraud and the entire Schiowitz empire crumbled.
EMS in the 80's was far different than it is today. The only jobs (outside the city) were with privates and you just endured the trials and tribulations of contract time.
Before the current model, Yonkers went through the same thing. I believe it went hospitals, Yonkers VAC (BLS with ALS provided by Yonkers PD paramedics on "e-rigs" or precursor to fly-cars), AA, Abbey Richmond, Empress but there may have been another round of rotations back then. Amazing how the memory fades with age. YPD continued providing paramedic services for quite some time, I'm not exactly sure when they stopped.

I can't speak for the labor history of Empress. I can only speak from my personal experience in N.R. Abbey Richmond had the New Rochelle contract from when N.R. Hospital stopped ambulance service Jan. 1, 1975 until around 1983-84 when Affiliated Ambulance was awarded the contract with a much lower bid then Abbey. Affiliated was able to do this because they had only a few EMTs and 1-2 paramedics. Once Abbey lost the contract there were more EMTs and Paramedics then Abbey could use so many of us jumped over with the promise of working only in N.R.. When we jumped we lost all our seniority, vacation pay, sick time and went to Affiliated starting pay, which was much lower then Abbey's for both EMTs and Paramedics. Most of us didn't want to leave our comfort zone, many had worked in N.R. for over 5 years. This was also good for the N.R. system. The police and fire knew us, the E.R. staff knew us, we knew N.R. and at that time the Pelham's also.
Affiliated systematically rotated in new EMTs and Paramedics into N.R. and then started to mess with the old timers,(they actually scheduled paramedics to do ambulette runs) to a point 80% of the old timers left Affiliated. It wasn't soon after the old timers left that Affiliated could not meet the contract and N.R. abruptly cancelled it. The City of N.R. then handed the contract to Empress who at the time had their own problems, but was the only remaining ambulance company that able to operate in Westchester. This was the jump start that Empress needed to grow.
Then the system cycled again and again to this point where Empress is the 6th contracted provider in N.R. When I spoke of stability in the EMS, I was also referring to the system itself, not just the employees. Every time a new provider enters the system, everyone has to adapt. However it is easier nowadays to have a smoother transition do to technology. CAD, GPS, cell phones, radios with talk-a-bout channels, etc.

I believe FDMV identifies the Battalion by which group is working.

Just to clarify, this call appears to have occurred after 7:00 p.m., when the career EMT from OVAC had already left, so OVAC isn't really involved in this specific matter.

It could be done. It may not be easy but it's possible. EMS is even more fragmented and disorganized than the fire service. If agencies are having a hard time getting out the door, working together could be a good option. There are also fewer laws and regulations in the way for merging or consolidating EMS agencies than there are for fire departments.

Used to be that the EMS agencies changed in the big cities on a regular basis. It was kind of a joke every time the contract was awarded. Most of the EMS crews would just change shirts and move into a different vehicle and voila, new agency. I guess it was when the contracts became zero bid and relied solely on billing (?) that the tenure of an agency got so much longer.

What was the nature of the injuries? 11 seems like an awful lot.

What's "normally in a sanctioned manner" mean?

They've done a lot of training for local agencies and explain this quite well in their class. If a complaint to Con Ed meets certain criteria (multiple calls, sensitive location, symptoms, etc.), they automatically notify the local FD and simultaneously dispatch their crews. Following the fatal explosion in NYC a couple years ago the State has mandated even more notifications to the local FD. The PSC also requires a response by the utility within 60 minutes to most complaints (there might be some complaints that require a 30 minute response but I don't remember the criteria) so they don't respond as quickly as an FD does.

I disagree. Dual response IS mutual aid for at least one of the agencies. Dual responses are usually because one district doesn'thave enough manpower or equipment to respond on their own. If departments charged for dual response, they could earn tens of thousands of dollars.

I'm not sure that home rule or unions are the problem or would alter the situation if they were different.

The problem is no standards!
Quite frankly there are a lot of so-called career departments operating every day with no regard for staffing standards so the lack of standards is not strictly a volunteer issue.

Why? Are you looking to take the easier one and then use reciprocity to get the other state's EMT certification?