County gives green light to third ambulance shift

WASHINGTON — Washington County supervisors have unanimously directed the local government’s ambulance service to get the ball rolling on a “third crew,” authorizing Interim Ambulance Director Katrina Altenhofen to start planning and hiring personnel for the added shift on schedule rosters.

The added emergency medical coverage won’t come online overnight, according to officials. The directive given at a meeting last week opted not to specify a time frame, nor have the specifics of a third crew’s schedule been ironed out.

“None of this is set in stone by any means,” Ambulance Billing Coder Jamie Brame said of a tentative schedule shared with supervisors. “This is just an idea of how it could work.”

A few other details are starting to cohere, however. Altenhofen said she expected to staff the rig primarily with people on 16-hour shifts, rather than 12-hour ones, after asking current employees about their preference between the two.

The median cost of wages and benefits for new hires needed to run the third crew is a cool $381,419. While that’s considerably more than the department’s $137,409 overtime budget last fiscal year, Altenhofen said it was about even with the combined costs of every unscheduled third and fourth crew called in over the last 12 months, but with infinitely more consistent service.

Once running, Altenhofen said a third crew would boost the county’s emergency response readiness, improving the odds that a staffed truck is up, running, and not committed elsewhere when a call comes in.

"The gold standard is to have a rig staffed with crew members for every thousand calls you have, and right now we have over 3,000 calls,“ she said. ”So we need to have more than just the two that we’ve currently got.“

While the vote of approval was unanimous, Supervisor Richard Young said he remained skeptical about the plan’s logistics. Altenhofen said some of the new hires would be part-timers, but Young said he worried they’d prove too unreliable to fill shifts.

“With the days that we don’t have somebody, how are we going to get the part-time people to fill those shifts?” he asked. “We all know, if you do this long enough, they’ll say, ‘Yeah, I’ll do it,’ but guess what, ‘I can’t work today because I want to do this.’ It happens.”

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com