A frightening statistic for those in desperate need of emergency services has come to light in Ulster County.
EMS agencies throughout the county are unable to put together a crew and respond to one out of ten 911 calls, on average.
“And that isn’t like a fluke in numbers,” explains Everett Erichsen, Ulster County’s Director of Emergency Services. “If you look at the weekly, monthly, quarterly numbers, we’re averaging nine to eleven percent of calls going unanswered, which, which is a very, very, very scary thing for us.”
While someone will always pick up the call at a county public safety answering point, there still remains the problem of having enough personnel and ambulances to respond.
“At times,” says Erichsen, “we’ve got like five, six, seven, eight dispatches for an ambulance [at the same time], where we’re pulling ambulances out of Sullivan County to respond. Wait times for up to an hour to get an ambulance at someone’s home. And that’s one of the big things that keeps me up at night with this job, not being able to provide assistance to our residents.”
In an attempt to cut that number down, the county legislature’s Law Enforcement and Public Safety Committee moved along a resolution on September 8 to provide $81,000 to the Center For Public Safety Management, a limited liability company which will perform a comprehensive study of the behaviors and patterns of emergency medical services countywide.
The department is currently reviewing its own internal protocols in an effort to ameliorate these problems. It is analyzing what is going on countywide from the time the phone rings to the time an ambulance arrives to a hospital with a person in distress. That analysis may best be accomplished through an outside study.
Speaking at the committee meeting, legislator Jonathan Heppner emphasized the dire situation of a person in distress when waiting for help. “I represent Woodstock and West Hurley,” said Heppner. “We have EMS going on the other side of the reservoir to help support calls, which is a scary thing when you think about it, especially if you’re that family on the other side of the reservoir waiting for an EMS squad from Woodstock to get there.”
Study or no, an acute shortage of staff remains to be reckoned with. Now.
“It’s a pay issue,” says deputy county executive Christopher Kelly. “We are not paying enough for the services they’re providing, or the private sector hasn’t been consistent enough in doing that. So they lose employees. Ask any of these EMS technicians, whether they’re volunteers or not they probably work two or three jobs …. When we first entered into this, it was partially assumed by some of us on the outside that this was largely a rural issue and a volunteer-based issue. But if you talk to anybody in the City of Kingston, they’re experiencing longer wait times and unanswered calls because of a lack of resources within the City of Kingston as well.”
Emergency workers have always had a higher rate of burnout than workers in other fields. The difficult work brings with it demanding mental and emotional stresses resulting from the traumatic experiences that can come with the job.
According to the American Ambulance Association, the number of emergency workers leaving the field appears to have accelerated in the last couple of years. The pandemic and low pay have been highlighted as the most common explanations.
While the townships and the villages are typically served by volunteer operated ambulances, Kingston is served by commercial for-profit ambulance services which operate in much the same way as a taxi service. The drivers responding to calls put over a radio by a dispatcher. Unlike a taxi service, though the men and women who arrive are trained to save lives or at least stabilize patients until they can get them to a hospital.
In the Hudson Valley, the privately owned Mobile Life Support has cornered the market. Its fleet of 73 vehicles are divided among 24 stations across the Hudson Valley. They are Kingston’s ambulance service.
Erichsen’s department plans to submit a letter to the New York State Department of Health urging it to be a course sponsor for EMS training locally. “We need to develop an EMS system,” he said, “that’s going to be sustainable for our residents.”
Legislator Abe Uchitelle, chair of the Law Enforcement and Public Safety Committee, has more reason than most to champion the resolution.
“I’ll just say, as someone personally whose life was saved by a very quick medical intervention at Kingston Hospital,” recalled Uchitelle, “and had to be transported, I am very much looking forward to supporting this work in any way that I can because I almost died. And it could happen to anybody. So this is the most critical work that we could do.”
Sponsored by Democratic legislator Uchitelle and Republican legislator Gina Hansut, the resolution to bankroll the study comes before the Ways and Means Committee this Tuesday evening September 13. The deputy chair of that committee is legislator Kenneth Ronk, himself the corps captain for Wallkill Ambulance Corps, a 100 percent volunteer organization.
Editor’s Note: A previous version of this article was lacking in clarity with regards to which 10% of calls go unanswered. The article has since been corrected.
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