An EMS system is a living, breathing organization. When it flourishes, great things happen. When it is under stress, the organization will attempt to accommodate and adjust, but at some point compensatory mechanisms fail and things begin to fall apart.
What’s happening at Austin-Travis County EMS can happen anywhere. This high performance system is experiencing small, but significant changes and issues of high turnover, mandatory holdovers and worsening morale.
An agency experiencing these issues has to tackle it head on. Both management and labor leadership must set aside daily differences to focus on immediate solutions that control the bleeding, followed by long-term plans that identify the core issues of subpar staffing and creating solutions that address them on a more permanent basis.
No two situations are alike
Local workforce availability, regulatory issues, political concerns, labor-management relations, and competition are factors in recruiting, hiring and retaining personnel. An EMS agency has to take the time to deeply investigate root causes and resolve those in order to achieve long lasting changes in staffing.
Sadly, most agencies tend to look only at the superficial issues and throw short-term solutions at them. Salary might attract folks to an organization, but its workplace satisfaction that keeps them there, year after year.
I’ll bet many of you, like me, remember working for organizations because we were treated like family or felt like we were valued and heard. We felt like we contributed, not only to our agency’s bottom line, but to our community. When that feeling of contributing to the community goes away there’s not much left that will keep us around.
Solutions are not always resource intensive. Sometimes a change in structure or culture is what’s needed to bring an organization back to its fighting weight. It just takes a little courage for its leaders to make those changes.
