Eau Claire Leader-Telegram. November 28, 2022.
Editorial: Rural EMS concerns must be addressed
If you missed it Monday, we had a story about the pressure emergency medical services are under in Wisconsin. It ran on A3 and, if you haven’t taken the time to read it yet, it’s worth the effort.
If there’s a hiring challenge that businesses have faced over the past couple years, EMS services probably have it, too. Shortage of qualified applicants? Check. Supply chain issues? Check. Inflation? Check.
The article focused largely on southern Wisconsin, though the basic issues are common to services just about everywhere. Daniel Pease, Beloit’s fire chief, called it “a nationwide problem.”
Pease suspects part of the issue is generational. Fewer people are signing up for departments that have depended for decades on people who knew they weren’t going to be paid for the work. That’s becoming a tougher sell, since fewer jobs allow workers to leave at a moment’s notice and wages have broadly failed to keep pace with inflation.
And, with almost every service looking for people with the same fundamental qualifications, there’s intense competition for the people who are willing to step up.
The problem is that many small fire and medical services depend on volunteers because they simply don’t have the money to do anything else. Without volunteers, the departments will quite simply cease to exist.
That’s where a proposal by Alan DeYoung, the executive director of the Wisconsin EMS Association, comes in. He’d like to see $500 million in annual funding for Wisconsin’s EMS departments.
There’s good reason for Wisconsin’s Legislature to take a hard look at that idea, and it goes well beyond the immediate issues in rural Wisconsin.
Rural fire and medical departments aren’t necessarily equipped or ready for large-scale events. So when there’s a major fire, for example, it’s not unusual in the least for the responding department to issue a request for mutual aid. That’s when departments from outside the immediate vicinity send over personnel and equipment.
Dwindling resources and personnel mean there are fewer people available for such mutual aid calls. Some departments may not have people to send. What happens then? The larger departments who have mutual aid agreements in place will be called upon more frequently.
Pease alluded to that shift in his comments. He said volunteer departments once provided a valuable backstop for larger services, but that relationship has now flipped. And James Ponkauskus, Janesville’s fire chief, backed that assessment.
“We’re running more calls,” he said. “It’s costing us more money.”
There’s another factor involved when small departments shut down or curtail services: Time. While the person whose house is on fire probably doesn’t care much which department responds, that person will most definitely care how quickly they respond.
Time matters significantly for EMS departments. The cases aren’t always as threats to life and limb, but any time they’re called out it’s because someone needs help. The faster help arrives, the faster that person is taken care of.
What’s the solution? That depends on where you stand. Doing nothing means that department closures and consolidations, already part of the landscape, will likely become more frequent. It’s not difficult to see a scenario where that, in turn, hurts volunteer departments further. It’s one thing when you know it’s a quick, five-minute dash to the department when a call goes out. It’s another when that department is 20 minutes and two towns over.
More money is the only way to maintain departments at their current levels of service. There are numerous means of getting to that point. Cities and counties could raise taxes. They can, as Eau Claire did this year, seek a referendum specifically for public safety.
But it’s also not unreasonable to say Congress and the Wisconsin Legislature need to take a careful look at things and see whether there’s a role for them. The devil may be in the details of any future proposal, but right now it doesn’t seem either body has a great grasp of the issue. That’s the starting point.
It has been generations since the majority of Americans lived in rural settings. Where 51% of Americans lived in urban settings in 1920, the first census in which a majority were not rural, that figure is higher than 75% today. But urban areas cannot afford to ignore the brewing crisis for rural EMS.
