Ambulance district explains staffing needs and justifies costs

By Crystal D. Hancock

Nevada Daily Mail

When someone is in need of immediate medical assistance in their home, who do they call?

How much time do they have before the situation becomes even more serious?

These are just a couple of the questions that Vernon County Ambulance District officials want the public to ask themselves.

When someone is in need of immediate medical assistance, they call for an ambulance and expect that ambulance to be at that location very quickly.

According to ambulance officials, the district employs one administrator, three paramedics, four EMTs and two full-time office assistants. They also employ one paramedic, nine EMTs and two RNs for part time service.

The cost to hire a full-time paramedic is approximately $39,000. This includes pre-employment testing, 1,200 hours of training, orientation, uniforms, insurance benefits and the first year salary. One of the goals of Proposition Lifesaver is to employ an additional eight to 10 medics for the county. This goal includes staff for the two proposed satellite stations with two medics at each station.

With more staff on hand, the amount of time it takes an ambulance to get to the patient's location may be seriously decreased, according to district officials. At times, there is not enough help on staff and someone may be called in from home in the middle of the night. The patient may be waiting an additional 15 minutes just so that the medic called in may have time to get into the station and en route.

"Every second matters in a life and death situation,"Vernon County Ambulance director James McKenzie said.

"We have a great, dedicated staff here now, but we do need more staff to better perform our services. We need to be able to offer more incentives to gain medics. It is difficult to get or keep staff who are not from our area with small salaries to offer them. With the tax, we will also be able to hopefully lessen our turnover rate of those we employ from out of area and have the opportunity to offer more than $7.50 per hour to starting EMTs."

A common misconception of local citizens is that the ambulance district charges too much for their services or that they should not be charging at all. It is necessary for the district to charge for services because money received from property revenue only represents 36 percent of the annual budget. Therefore, charges are required to provide the emergency medical services, according to McKenzie.

The current base charges for services are determined by the medical need of the patient. Insurance requirements mandate the various levels of treatment and how those services are charged. The base rate for basic life support in Vernon county is $353. Medicare only covers $269 of that and Medicaid only covers $80. Mileage is $8.21 per mile and is not covered by Medicare or Medicaid. Advanced life support's base rate is $520. Medicare only covers $325 and Medicaid only $152, per district officials.

Neighboring ambulance services such as Joplin and Carthage actually charge much more for basic and advanced life support services. Joplin basic life support is $468.88 and advanced is $644.65, not including $9.78 per mile. Carthage basic life support charge is $838 and for advanced the charge is $960, not including $12 per mile.

"As citizens can see, Vernon County ambulance charges are about as low as possible," McKenzie said. "With Proposition Lifesaver, we do not plan to raise the rates for ambulance services, we plan to keep them as low as possible and to improve our equipment and medic pay, along with setting up satellite stations in two different locations around the county to improve response time."