Copyright 2006 Albuquerque Journal
By EMILY CRAWFORD
Albuquerque Journal (New Mexico)
Dialing 911 in case of 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 highly 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.
Facing a shortage
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.
Nationally, the need for paramedics and emergency medical technicians is expected to grow at a rate of more than 24 percent through the year 2014, according to U.S. Department of Labor statistics.
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.
“People come in and can’t afford to live in Santa Fe, and gas prices keep going up,” he said.
Retirement, promotions, vacation and sick time all contribute to a rotating door of paramedics that makes it “hard to catch up.”
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.
Extra training
Paramedics are emergency medical technicians with advanced training to treat patients on the scene and transport them to medical centers.
Paramedics and EMTs are typically sent to a scene by a 911 dispatcher and work with police and fire department personnel.
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.
Fire departments across the region are eagerly anticipating the new graduates of the program.
Michael Thompson, fire marshal and acting EMS chief in Los Alamos, has struggled to keep even the minimum number of paramedics on his staff, he said.
The department keeps two paramedics on duty at all times, but a short roster translates to regular overtime for the 12 paramedics on staff.
Eventually, he hopes to have 24 to 30 paramedics to offset those on the verge of retirement.
Sending his EMTs to Albuquerque for training has also been expensive and time consuming, he said.
“That’s a long distance for our guys to go for a year-long process,” Thompson said.
Crash course
The SFCC program is only six months in duration and is designed to be shorter and more intensive than the yearlong UNM program to get students into the field faster.
In the city of Santa Fe, the biggest challenge is keeping a paramedic stationed on each of the city’s five ambulances.
“You can’t have an ambulance without a paramedic,” Rivera said. “It gets exhaustive for them, they are tired and they are having to fill in when people are gone.”
Santa Fe County currently has four vacant paramedic positions.
Though the county has four regional paramedic trucks on duty 24 hours a day, 365 days a week, those four trucks are based in La Cienega, Pojoaque, Edgewood and Hondo.
That translates to a long response time if a call comes from Madrid for the truck in La Cienega, Holden said.
“Those trucks respond to all the emergency medical calls and fire calls throughout Santa Fe County, he said. “Geographically, when you have limited resources, you have to cover the population the best you can.”
Eve Kwiatkowski is the paramedic program director at Santa Fe Community College.