By Andy Alcock
WLKY
Summary of Studies on Work Hour Management The following is an except from a 2007 report by the IAFC, “Effects of Sleep Deprivation on Fire Fighters and EMS Responders.” Firefighting and EMS response work cover a wide spectrum of activities and conditions, and generalizing recommendations is difficult. Principles that apply across the range of worksites include becoming educated about the performance and health effects of fatigue and assessing work structures and job demands. Involving emergency medical services personnel and their families, management, representatives from labor organizations and national administrative bodies, and sometimes outside consultants is important in the success of any fatigue management program. Those working long duration shifts can improve their wellbeing by leading healthy lifestyles. • Chronic sleep deprivation may not be recognized, and it is important for workers to acknowledge their need for and maximize their ability to achieve adequate restorative sleep. • Coping with long work hours may be facilitated by identifying workers at higher risk for difficulties in adjusting, such as those with sleep disorders. • Fatigue is a risk for motor vehicle crashes, and commuting home following long duration shifts may be an especially vulnerable time for workers. • Personnel, their families, management and consultants, working in collaboration, are best able to structure work hours and circumstances to meet the needs of professional excellence and employee well being that typify fire fighting and EMS work. Click here to read the full report. |
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Dozens of overtime hours, incomes nearly doubling and an increase in mandatory overtime hours — those findings are from a WLKY investigation into Metro Emergency Medical Services overtime.
Metro EMS is an around-the-clock service. There’s currently built-in overtime for the agency’s emergency medical technicians and paramedics, as well as mandatory and voluntary overtime to cover all that time.
But at what point does an excessive work load become a public safety issue?
Performing a job where every second counts, WLKY found some Metro EMS workers are routinely putting in dozens of hours of overtime each two-week pay period.
Former Metro EMS paramedic Missy Shuck, who retired nearly two years ago, said she remembers routine instances of extreme fatigue when her shifts would be nearing an end.
“And I would pray that I didn’t have anything serious that I would have to deal with, because I didn’t know whether I’d be able to mentally function,” she said.
Shuck acknowledges at times, her fatigue was partly her own making. As WLKY first reported last year, shuck led Metro EMS employees in overtime earnings in 2007.
She admits she volunteered for the extra hours in her final year at EMS, because state retirement is based on employees top three earning years.
And Shuck is far from alone. Paramedics and EMTs each work 12-hour days, three days one week, four days the next week, meaning eight hours of built-in overtime that second week.
Their contract requires no more than a 16-hour shift any one day.
However, according to records exclusively obtained by WLKY, we found one paramedic who we’re told is nearing retirement, who in the first eight months of 2009, earned nearly $33,000 of overtime alone.
To get it, he worked an average of nearly 44 overtime hours every two weeks, on top of the 76 hours of non-overtime pay, including one two-week span when he was credited with more than 104 hours of overtime, in large part because during the same period, he was credited with six vacation days when he also worked.
In other two-week spans, he worked more than 76 and 72 hours of overtime.
Records also show other employees commonly work dozens of overtime hours, including one EMT who worked 86½ hours of overtime in a two-week span.
Col. Craig Rodgers of Metro EMS said excessive fatigue should be a non-issue for the department.
“If anybody ever feels tired, too tired to work, we’d let them go, no questions asked,” he said.
“A lot of groggy drivers, you have a lot of sleepy paramedics, sleepy EMTs,” Shuck said. “I think it’s just not a good situation.”
Shuck said she recalls one instance when she was working on a patient in the back of an ambulance for a non-emergency run one night when her partner driving the unit stopped at a traffic light.
“Then I realize we’ve been sitting here an awful long time and look up and your partner’s nodded off in the front seat,” she said.
“I think if somebody got to the point where they were that tired, I certainly would hope that they would come and say something,” Rodgers said.
Shuck said that incidents like that happen more often than anybody knows about.
“I think what you’ve got is a disgruntled former employee who is making an issue about something that’s really not there,” said Todd Thompson of the Teamsters Union.
“From a safety standpoint, you have people who are working too many hours, not enough of them out there, not enough of them at any one point in time,” said Metro Councilman Kelly Downard, R-Louisville.
When EMS was part of the fire service, paramedics and EMTs worked 24-hour shifts, and with overtime, 36-hour shifts weren’t uncommon.
However, there was one significant difference: Sleeping was allowed during down times in those shifts.
It is not allowed at Metro EMS.
Crunching The Numbers
It’s expected to cost more than $25 million to run Metro Louisville EMS this current budget year.
At roughly $3 million, overtime for employees accounts for about 12 percent of that figure.
Nearly four years ago, EMS workers gave director Dr. Neal Richmond an earful about a schedule change.
Those paramedics and EMTs were used to working 12-hour shifts, which included eight hours of built in overtime every two weeks -- but beginning in 2006, a change was made to 10-hour shifts.
City leaders said they did it because under the 12-hour plan, there was $1.2 million in built-in overtime.
Under the 10-hour plan, there is zero built in overtime.
City leaders also promised more coverage with the 10-hour plan, including 30 ambulances working at any one time compared to 24 with the 12-hour plan.
But the employees complained the 10-hour shifts left more gaps in coverage for a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week service resulting in more mandatory or hold over overtime hours.
Last December, Louisville Mayor Jerry Abramson announced Metro EMS would go back to 12-hour shifts and scrap the 10-hour plan.
“We tried it. It didn’t work,” he said at the time. “Dr. Richmond has asked us to change it. We’ve changed it.”
One of the promises of moving back to the 12-hour shift was a decrease in mandatory overtime, but according to records WLKY exclusively obtained, it hasn’t worked out that way.
In July 2008, under the 10-hour work schedule, there was 1,058 hours of mandatory EMS overtime.
In July 2009, that number was 1,331½ hours, a nearly 26 percent increase from the previous year.
“The change in 12-hour work duty was supposed to relieve that and what you’re telling me is that it didn’t work,” Downard said.
“The reason that we have more overtime right now, or at least the mandatory holds, is because we have increased sick call, we have increased injury on duty, we’ve had increased Family Medical Leave Act,” Rodgers said.
And Rodgers says coupled with recent retirements, it’s been more challenging to fill all the shifts.
Rodgers said Metro EMS aggressively recruits new people, but also has a challenging eight-week hiring process he says makes the agency one of the most difficult e-m-s systems across the country in which to get hired.
“But what we want to have here is we want to have quality people,” he said. “That takes time.”
“I don’t think they have enough employees working for the department to cover the shifts that they have available,” Shuck said.
Shuck says it’s especially difficult to keep new employees because with their lack of seniority, they get the brunt of the mandatory overtime.
According to Metro EMS records there are 263 positions for paramedics, EMTs and other operations employees.
There are currently 36 vacancies, or just fewer than 14 percent of the jobs not filled.
That lengthy hiring process is currently under way to fill 23 of those openings.
“The burnout factor is really high with EMS,” Shuck said.
“I think there can always be more employees,” Thompson said.
Reprinted with permsision of WLKY.