Adding more ambulances companies to an area may make response times look better, but it has the potential to worsen the health of the overall system by reducing the number of transports to each service.
It seems like that’s what’s going on in this article about an existing New York ambulance squad that’s against the plan to create another service in the southern part of the county. But I’m baffled as to why someone would propose that in the first place, when it appears there are already a few agencies available.
Are these for inter-facility calls? 911 calls? Both? Where do the for-profit services fit in with the local rescue squad? More specifically, what is the driving need?
There doesn’t seem to be a lot of data collection going on here, and without that it’ll be tough to understand how the current system is performing. You can’t find a solution without knowing what the problem really is. If in fact the current service is not able to respond to calls effectively, that requires further inspection and a chance for the service to make improvements.
EMS systems are complex, no matter their size. In some ways the dynamic being presented is reminiscent of how EMS used to operate back in the bad ol’ days —no systematic, organized approach to identifying the issues and their root causes.
Given the health care nature of the business, the cost of running an EMS service is very significant. Services often run in the red despite the best effort to collect on insurance.
It’ll be iteresting to see how this situation evolves. Reading between the lines, it feels like there’s more than meets the eye.
