By EMILY CRAWFORD
Albuquerque Journal
SANTA FE, N.M. — Dialing 911 in an emergency is a reflex most of us have never had to use. Yet we know the end of the story — once the call is placed, help is on the way with sirens blaring and lights flashing.
Behind the scenes, a critical shortage of paramedics in northern New Mexico makes staffing ambulances with the trained emergency first-responders a challenging endeavor.
Though local fire chiefs stress that their departments are ready to respond to emergencies 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, they acknowledge the difficulty of hiring and retaining paramedics.
“It’s tough to cover what we need to with a limited amount of people,” Santa Fe interim fire chief Chris Rivera said. “We have a shortage of paramedics around the state.”
To address that shortage, a consortium of fire chiefs across northern New Mexico has partnered with officials at Santa Fe Community College to create a paramedic training program. After three years, their endeavor will be rewarded with the first paramedic class offered at the college in August.
“It is a public service program,” said Meredith Machen, assistant vice president for educational leadership. “We are going to make a dent, but a tiny one, in the huge shortage that New Mexico is facing.”
The first class of 15 students will be firefighters and emergency responders from regional fire departments.
“The best long-term solution is to have your own program and train your local people to the paramedic level,” Santa Fe County Fire Chief Stan Holden said. “All we are doing right now is stealing from each other, and that doesn’t do us any good,” he said of the fire departments’ battle for paramedics.
Evidence points to some 200 current or expected vacancies in paramedic positions around the region, according to Eve Kwiatkowski, the director of Santa Fe Community College’s new paramedic program.
Contributing factors for that shortage include fewer workers going into health care, the growth of Santa Fe, Las Vegas, N.M., and Farmington and an aging population, putting a higher demand on medical services, she said.
Due to Santa Fe’s high cost of living, many paramedics live in Rio Rancho or Albuquerque and commute to jobs up north. Fire departments here often lose personnel to the Albuquerque area when positions there become available, Rivera said.
Contributing to the shortage has been the lack of a paramedic training facility in northern New Mexico. The closest paramedic program is at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. That program fills quickly and cannot possibly produce graduates fast enough, Holden said.
The training for paramedic certification is rigorous. The new program at SFCC requires 1,000 hours of training within six months. Classes run four days a week, eight hours a day. The college currently offers basic and intermediate EMT certifications, a requirement for the paramedic program.