EMS Agency Take-Overs

In the final article this week, quite a few EMS agencies and organizations are closing their doors, especially in rural environments with low call volumes. In the face of rising fuel prices, they are struggling to remain open without the volume to give them a consistent billing resource or profitability to maintain the ambulances. So a lot of communities are really struggling with this and in many cases county, state or local municipalities are taking over the duties to fulfill the needs of these communities.

Breaking Up is Hard to Do

This is what is happening with the situation from Smithfield, North Carolina. The Smithfield Herald is reporting that Johnston County has three different agencies that are being picked up and taken over by the county. It’s been difficult for the County to take over these community ambulance services although, in some cases, they were able to quickly transition using the equipment from the defunct agencies along with the crews.

However, one of them was a privately owned ambulance service that had contracted for the area and they had to close their doors but they couldn’t just give somebody the equipment. For legal reasons, there had to be some type transfer involved in order to get rid of the capital assets like the ambulances and expensive equipment.

EMS Break Ups Near You

If you’re involved in this kind of a process where you are dismantling an old system and switching to a new system or even covering for another system that has closed, please contact me and tell us what is going on. In this situation, in many cases a lot of the paramedics and EMS professionals involved basically just changed the patch worn on their uniform and continued to serve the same community, in the same equipment, same truck and everything, that they’d been using for years.

I just wanted to just give you guys a notice that this is happening everywhere and you may be involved in some way with the transfer. This article shows that it is not always just as simple as taking over and just giving it to another agency for management or the health department or something like that. So keep this in mind.

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Catch the rest of the news from this week’s show in Episode 293 – Rural Nevada Critical Care Innovator Pat Songer from the MedicCast.

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