By Timothy Puko
Pittsburgh Tribune Review
PITTSBURGH — Two suburban ambulance services are talking about a merger.
NorthWest Emergency Medical Services and the combined Valley/Quaker Valley Ambulance authorities will study their options for sharing services or merging, the entities’ officials announced Wednesday.
The ambulance services together cover 27 Allegheny County towns — stretching from Bellevue to Findlay — and spend more than $7 million annually.
Both are financially healthy, but Valley/Quaker Valley has had financial problems recently, and officials want to ensure their long-term survival. The study comes as state and county leaders push for municipal services mergers. Ambulance company leaders say they will pursue grants for their effort.
“We’d like to get to a point quickly where we can lead the way for some of the other communities,” said George Dudash, co-owner of NorthWest, one of the region’s few privately owned ambulance companies. “This has really been driven home at meetings recently: Everyone’s kind of just always done the same things, and that just can’t go on anymore. Some agencies just have huge losses every year.”
A sharing agreement is more likely than a merger, Dudash said.
The services cover a lot of adjacent territory and could benefit from a formal agreement to help cover each other’s territory, said J.R. Henry, director of Valley/Quaker Valley, which already shares staff, equipment and a building in Moon.
NorthWest and Valley/Quaker Valley already help cover each other’s territory informally, but formal coordination could help them keep staffing down during slow times or reduce supervisors and dispatchers, Henry said.
“We have a lot of common problems,” Henry said. “This industry has sort of been leading the way in terms of consolidation. This is just more of an ongoing effort because of the struggles EMS services are having. It’s the next logical step to continue to look for efficiencies.”
Any deal could include performance standards to make sure response times aren’t lengthened, Dudash said.
Copyright 2010 Tribune Review Publishing Company
All Rights Reserved