COOK- It’s a refrain all too common to small-town ambulance services not only across the region but across the country, and it’s one that’s been uttered by Karen Schultz ever since she stepped into the interim director’s role at Cook Ambulance Service last year: They need more personnel. And for Schultz, the plea is urgent.
“It’s been an ongoing thing and we’re not the only ambulance by far that’s struggling with people,” Schultz said. “But we don’t have enough even for two people some days. We have a lot of open shifts where we might just have an EMR or an EMT. But if we don’t have two people, an ambulance can’t leave the hall.”
That second person could be a volunteer firefighter who could drive the ambulance, Shultz said, but since they’re not scheduled staff there have been times when no one has been available.
Schultz does what she can to be that second person much of the time. Outside of the 24 hours a week she’s required to devote to director duties, she pulls between 430 and 490 hours a month of on-call time.
But still, gaps remain, and when a Cook ambulance can’t run, that triggers a call for mutual aid from more distant ambulances in Tower or Orr. Schultz spoke in glowing terms of the relationships the Cook service has with their counterparts in Orr and Tower and credited former director Tina Rothleutner for working hard to build them.
“I don’t want to speak for Tower or Orr, but I am very, very, very grateful for the help that they give me when I’m short,” Schultz said. “We’ve gone to Orr and Tower, too. I think now with the directors in place we’re all working very well together.”
But having to call in Orr or Tower when Cook can’t run increases the wait time for an ambulance to arrive at the scene of a call. For minor situations, the delay may only cause frustration. For more serious situations, a delay could be life-threatening.
“Let’s say a page goes out at midnight. By the time we get to the hall it’s ten minutes,” Schultz said. “But let’s say I don’t have anybody there and they send out three pages, that’s 15 minutes of them paging us. On that third page they’re going to page mutual aid. So, if they page Tower, they have to get to their hall and get enroute, and if it’s on the east side of Cook, we’re still talking 15 to 20 minutes response time. And if the roads are bad like they were today, that drive from Tower could take a half hour to 45 minutes.”
Transferring patients from one medical facility to another is an additional activity that impacts the service’s ability to respond to emergency calls, and Cook Ambulance does a lot of transfers, Schulz said, to Virginia, Hibbing, Duluth, Cloquet, and even as far as North Dakota.
And Schultz noted that when Tower or Orr have to respond to mutual aid calls, that likely leaves their own service area uncovered if an emergency call comes in.
“We’re all shorthanded and struggling,” she said.
Cook Ambulance currently has 19 EMRs, EMTs, and a couple of paramedics on their roster, and they’re volunteers of all ages, married and single, most with full-time or part-time jobs. They’re required to do a minimum of 24 hours on-call every month. Some do the bare minimum, some do more, but still, it’s not enough to provide complete 24/7 coverage. And the service is down a couple of members who had to be terminated because they had racked up three months without submitting their available monthly hours to be scheduled on time, Schultz said.
They’ve tried various ways of recruiting, Schultz said, but volunteers have been hard to come by. An aging population, more area residents commuting elsewhere for jobs, and families with more responsibilities and activities are some of the common things holding people back from stepping up, she noted.
She also suggested that on-call pay of $3/hour for EMRs and $4/hour for EMTs wasn’t particularly attractive to folks who would rather stay at home than spend those on-call hours at the station.
If someone lives less than 10 minutes away, they can elect to do those hours at home, she said, but it still requires a strong commitment.
“People have to realize that just because the page goes out at 1 a.m., you can’t roll over and say, ‘I’ll get that at five o’clock,’” she said.
Schultz hopes that a proposal she’s putting together for the city council to raise on-call rates by $1/hour might help a little. It’s an idea that’s been floated before, but Schultz is committed to do whatever she can to get it approved.
And for someone who wants to join the ambulance service but lacks the training, Cook has financial assistance to get it, Schultz said. The city will pay the full amount for the training up front to get started, and ultimately the city pays 75 percent of the cost and the trainee 25 percent. Two people are currently taking advantage of that, Schultz said.
If you’d like to learn more about what working for Cook Ambulance entails or how to obtain training, Schultz would like to hear from you. Call the ambulance service at 218-666-2866.