Hurley needs a reliable medical safety net

Hurley is working out the logistics of forming an ambulance district with paid EMTs to address the lack of volunteers.

“I hear stories from some long-timers about people competing to get a seat in the ambulance, about having a roster of 40 EMTs,” said consultant Kent Fitzgerald during an August 13 presentation on the plan. “EMS has changed. There was a time in the Sixties and Seventies where a station wagon and a stretcher, a red light and a siren, and some very basic first-aid training was what you needed to run an EMS operation. Medicine and EMS has become much more complicated, sophisticated and demanding.”

The amount of training to become an EMT — an entry level of 192 hours of training — is a big ask for a volunteer position, Fitzgerald said.

Call volume has increased as the ambulance has evolved from a last-resort measure to a default safety net for medical care. Though doctors seldom make house calls any more, telehealth services have been of some help.

Only twelve of Hurley’s 6000 residents are active in EMS. When the volunteer companies can’t respond, other communities answer the call through mutual aid, further increasing response times.

One solution is to pay people in existing volunteer ambulance units, something Woodstock has done by adding four part-time paid EMTs to its roster.

That system has its drawbacks. “Individuals cannot be volunteer and paid in the same position,” Fitzgerald said. “And a lot of departments, once they start to go that route of volunteer and paid, find themselves going down the slippery slope of losing volunteers very rapidly.”

Moving to a paid service would cost a Hurley taxpayer with a $500,000 home about $140 per year.

Initially, the ambulance service can be operated out of the existing firehouses, but down the road the town might think about building a central location, gaining further efficiencies.

Average response time for a paid ambulance crew from the West Hurley firehouse is about ten minutes, the same as from Route 28 and Waughkonk Road. It’s 14 minutes from Dug Hill Road.

Next steps include further information-gathering, budget planning and legal consultation. A public hearing is slated for September, followed by a voter referendum.