The Star-Ledger (Newark, New Jersey)
Copyright 2007 Newark Morning Ledger Co.
All Rights Reserved
NEWARK, N.J. — It is time for New Jersey to work on a full-scale reorganization of its emergency medical services system, and to do it with lights flashing and sirens blaring.
A question that must be answered is whether municipalities should be responsible for emergency medical services, as they are for police and fire services. That’s the recommendation of an EMS study commissioned by the Legislature and released last week.
Cities and towns could organize some combination of volunteer, hospital and public units or share services across municipal borders. One place to begin would be with a statewide EMS medical director. The report also says EMS pay and benefits, particularly pensions, should be similar to those of other public safety employees. The financial implications of that will leave local officials gasping.
The report raises many hard questions, particularly the financial ones. New Jersey must, however, pursue the answers without delay. The report — based in great part on reflections from a wide range of state emergency personnel — finds the state’s EMS system in “near crisis.” High-quality paramedic units are threatened because federal Medicare and Medicaid do not pay enough to sustain hospital-based units. Volunteer EMS squads are having an increasingly difficult time recruiting enough members to staff their units. New Jersey does not license all volunteer units or fully regulate their staff training or equipment. EMS units are not all required to provide patient care reports, and no comprehensive data are collected on the time it takes to respond to a call.
EMS communications are often disjointed. One North Jersey EMS unit needs seven different radios to talk to all the emergency personnel in the area. We add this concern: A number of New Jersey hospitals are teetering on the financial edge. If they go, they will take emergency rooms and other important components of the EMS system with them. It will take careful planning for EMS response and transport to function over greater distances and make critical decisions about whether the nearest hospital is the best hospital for a given patient.
Previous attempts to reconfigure emergency services have run headlong into the politics of home rule and volunteers who often bristle at regulation. Vested interests and egos must give way to the pressing public need to devise the best system for handling emergencies whether medical, natural or man-made.