There is a crisis looming in the region and the state – one that recently became evident when Clarion Hospital significantly cut its emergency service to the Marienville area.
“The ambulance at the Clarion Hospital had to stop services in Marienville from 7 at night to 7 in the morning because they don’t have staff,” Clarion County Commissioner Ted Tharan said. “The Sigel Volunteer Fire Company in northern Jefferson County is covering the Marienville area during the night.”
Several departments from three counties cover parts of the Marienville area. Supervisors in Jenks Township, where Marienville is located, determine the coverage.
Clarion Hospital Emergency Medical Service, however, is still running full services 24 hours a day, seven days a week in its two other stations in Clarion and New Bethlehem.
Tharan said although there are five fire companies in Clarion County that offer ambulance service to some degree, “not all are able to provide a full crew at all times.”
In contrast, Tim Dunkle, director of Venango County’s Emergency Management Agency, said he has no knowledge of any shortage of EMTs in Venango County.
“We don’t have any direct knowledge of that beyond dispatching,” he said.
“We have almost every fire department in the county running QRS. There may be one or two who do not. The only fire department that runs ALS (advanced life support) is Oil City. I know they are testing for people, but I am not sure what their staffing levels are at this time.”
In Jefferson County, there are 11 fire departments that run a QRS. Two others dropped the service.
“We only have one advanced life support service, and that is Jefferson County EMS,” Zents said. “So when there is not an ambulance available in the Brookville area, they bring a unit from Punxsutawney.”
There also is the issue of lack of efficiency as the result of time it takes to travel from Clarion to Marienville or Punxsutawney to Brookville.
Chris Clark, chief of the Warsaw Volunteer Fire Company in Jefferson County, said if a company is on a call for a fall, for example, it must wait at the scene for up to 45 minutes for an ambulance to arrive. A crew can be at the scene for an hour or more for a medical call.
“People are burning out that way,” said Clark, who is also Jefferson County’s 911 director. “We are getting fewer people to turn out, and that places more of a burden on the four or five people who do turn out.
“It is a domino effect, all the way from the top to the bottom. We no longer have the people available to go on these calls.”
Where’s the trouble?
Zents said all the services in need of emergency personnel are having trouble.
One reason, Zents said, is because of required training. To become a paramedic requires about two years of training, and to become an emergency medical technician requires about six months of training.
“Another reason is the pay,” Zents said. “The starting wage is around $10 an hour.”
Tharan said there also is a problem with how ambulances are permitted to charge.
“When you go to the hospital, you get charged for every Band-Aid and aspirin,” he said. “The ambulance service gets paid $350 per run. When an ambulance gets a call … if that person refuses treatment they cannot bill for that run.”
Zents said there are “a lot of avenues” in need of address.
“When you look at the EMS service, no one is getting any younger,” he said. “Eventually, those people are going to be leaving and there won’t be anyone younger to step into those ranks.”
Staffing problems facing many ambulance services, Zents said, relate to working conditions.
“Many of the services operate on a 24-hour schedule,” said Zents, who has two children trained as paramedics. “That 24-hour-on and 24-hour-off schedule can burn them out quicker because they are not only handling emergency calls, but transports.
“In Jefferson County, there are 325 registered EMTs, but out of that there are only 137 who are active. That doesn’t mean they are running.”
Some of those with active registration “are not running,” and “those are not pretty numbers,” he said.
At one point in Jefferson County, there were eight ambulance services. Now there are five.
“We went from having 25 ambulances available down to 15 or 16 available, and that depends on if you can get crews for them,” Zents said.
Looking for a solution
Zents said legislation must provide a higher reimbursement for ambulance companies to make it sustainable.
“There has to be some protocols set forth for ambulance calls that burn out the responders,” he said. “For example, when someone calls in and says they stubbed their toe, there has to be another avenue to do that.”
Tharan said Clarion County commissioners have met with Rep. Donna Oberlander on legislation at the state level.
“When some of the fire departments started QRS, they would be running 40 or 50 calls a year, and now they are running two or three medical calls a week,” Clark said.
Tharan said the situation is becoming critical.
“We are trying to find a solution before it goes so far that you can’t fix it,” Tharan said. “We really need to be thinking about how we can do something in the county.”
Clarion County Commissioner Wayne Brosius said one thing people can do is to become members of their local ambulance service.
“I don’t think we want to wake up some morning and find out there is no ambulance service,” Tharan said. “We need to have a conversation before it is too late.”