Hurley residents seem mostly in favor of a paid ambulance service for the town. The town government is considering spending about $450,000 to kick-start the arrangement.
Nurse practitioner Gretchen Fitzgerald said she was surprised to find EMS was volunteer when she moved to West Hurley.
“That is a totally different ball game,” she said. “So this is a critical service, and this is the only aspect of medicine, if you think about it, that’s volunteer. So our doctors are not volunteers, our healthcare nurses are not volunteers. And when we’re sick, we are expecting our doctors to be there?”
To rely on a few very hard-working volunteers to go out in the middle of the night or whenever was just not sustainable, Fitzgerald added. “If you ask anyone in the community what their expectation is, if they call 911, they want someone to come right away.”
Nurse-practitioner Alan Glickman, who lives in Hurley, said he had been a senior EMS instructor for Ulster County for many years. “I don’t know if you realize how much training these people have to go through, even to become a volunteer on an ambulance service, and how much time and dedication it takes,” said Glickman.
Based on his experience working in an emergency room, Glickman said, paid service was the way to go.
“If you want to have good protection in the town, this is the way forward,” he said, “because you need to have these people available, and you cannot expect them to give up just their own personal time. They have to be compensated for what they do.”
Not enough volume?
Bill Tweeddale, who works as a physician’s assistant in urgent care, doesn’t believe Hurley is big enough to go it alone.
“I think we need emergency medical services, but I don’t think the Town of Hurley has enough volume to justify a private ambulance service,” he said.
Tweeddale would like to see Hurley engage with fire districts in Ulster, Spring Lake, Bloomington and other nearby communities.
“I don’t think that $450,000 would be well spent to handle 12 calls a week. Since I worked as a paramedic, most of the time you sit around reading and watching television,” he said. “In fact, it worked out very well for me, because I was able to study to get into PA school. But for the ambulance company, they went out of business.”
Phil Sinagra, chairman of the Hurley Fire District board of commissioners, partly agreed with Tweeddale. A commercial ambulance company cannot give the town the coverage it needs.
“I do think we need our own ambulance.” he said. “You can’t put a pricetag on a person’s life. And having worked for several different commercial ambulances, what’s going to happen is they’re going to offer a package deal to five towns. Well, that’s great if it’s me that they’re coming to, but if it’s not me and I’m having a heart attack, I want to know that I have my own town’s ambulance coming to get me.”
We have looked for help
Hurley fire chief Joseph Decker said EMS had been “an ongoing issue for quite a few years, and we’ve been living along, kind of kicking the can down the road, so to speak.”
Five EMTs doing all the calls in the main Hurley hamlet, but work schedules get in the way. “Everybody works,” Decker said. “Everybody works more than eight hours a day. We have done what we can do. We’ve supported the township. We service our townspeople, and we do it for zero dollars. We need help. We have looked for help. We sat and we’ve looked at all the different avenues, and this is what we came up with. And again, we are here for you.”
A four-town solution?
Hurley town supervisor Mike Boms said the county told the town EMS was a state problem, but the state said it was a county problem.
“Each call is about three hours long to get there, stabilize, transport, stay in the hospital with them, and go through the whole thing,” Boms said. “So if they get two calls a day, six hours alone. The other 18 hours, it’s a reward for that, basically, because they’re putting their lives on the line.”
Hurley has talked with Ulster, Rosendale and Kingston, Boms said. The amount it would cost to work with those towns was the same as running a service alone, he thought.
Safety committee chair and councilmember Debbie Dougherty agreed that the four-town solution would take a lot more time.
“Because you have four different towns, everybody’s going to be up to their own interests,” she explained. “It’s going to take a lot of negotiation, a lot of time at the table. But again, it doesn’t mean that we won’t sit at that table. We absolutely will, because any way we go we have to have a tax district, because we have to pay for this.”
The ambulance service will likely use the $450,000 in seed money for its first year. By the second year, revenue from insurance reimbursements might offset operating costs.
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