Ambulance staffing worries both Key West officials and firefighters

BY PRU SOWERS

KONK LIFE STAFF WRITER

An ongoing contract impasse between the city of Key West and its local firefighters’ union means that some ambulances will respond to an emergency manned by one medical technician, not the usual two.

While there are three ambulances for every shift, the 2015 collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with the International Firefighters Association Local 1424 requires five personnel per shift to operate the ambulances. When the contract was negotiated, the city had just begun providing emergency medical services – a private contractor had provided ambulance service prior to that – and it was unclear how often the ambulances would be called into service.

But demand for EMS has been higher than expected, often requiring all three ambulances to be out at the same time. As a result, one of the emergency vehicles has had to roll with one medical technician. While an ambulance can legally answer a call with one person, any patient transport to a hospital requires two trained medical personnel.

“I definitely don’t want an ambulance pulling up to my house with one person on it,” said Commissioner Billy Wardlow, a former Key West fire chief.

“My take on this is that most everyone agrees there should be two personnel on each ambulance,” said Commissioner Sam Kaufman. “If we can’t afford to do that within a reasonable budget, then we do need to have a discussion about doing something else.”

City fire officials first tried to solve the problem by shifting one of the two firefighters assigned to the department ladder truck to the ambulance crew. The CBA calls for two ladder truck personnel per shift as well as four personnel for the firetrucks at each of the city’s three fire stations. But the union filed a grievance, saying the CBA requires the city to make “every reasonable effort” to maintain the contractual personnel levels on the fire and ladder trucks. The city lost that legal challenge when an arbitrator ruled it had not fulfilled the contract requirements.

As a result, fire officials have handled the ambulance call overflow by adding a sixth staffer to the ambulance crew and paying that person overtime. That helped boost the fire department overtime costs in the 2016-17 fiscal year to more than $300,000, a disturbingly high figure, said Key West Fire Chief Michael Davila.

The safety of sending an ambulance out with only one personnel is also a concern to the Local 1424 firefighters union. According to Omar Garcia, union president, an uptick in special events held in Key West and the increase in the number of new homes and commercial businesses in the city have boosted calls for ambulance service.

“Our stated public record is clear in the overall documented safety concerns of the Key West Firefighters Local 1424 (Rescue Division) … specifically, in not having two dedicated personnel on each of the three rescue ambulance units. Several months have gone by with several repeated phone calls that something needs to be done,” Garcia wrote in an email to Commissioner Kaufman.

But Mayor Craig Cates pointed out that if a third ambulance is called out with only one personnel, a ladder truck accompanies that ambulance. All but two of the 70 firefighters are certified as emergency medical technicians and can assist with emergency medical calls and patient transportation.

“To say that it’s a public safety issue and we’re sending an ambulance to an emergency for a resident with just one person on it is not truthful,” Cates said.

But adding a ladder truck to an emergency call is not ideal either because of the added cost of operating that vehicle and the fact it would not be able to respond to a fire emergency while on a medical call. City Manager Jim Scholl said the only way to solve the personnel imbalance would be for the union to agree to change the CBA. While that sounds like a simple problem to solve, Scholl said, the city and union have different interpretations of staffing language in the CBA and right now, an arbitrator agrees with the union.

“It was made clear to us that we had to live within those [staffing] numbers that were in that contract for the duration of the contract,” Scholl said. “That’s not ideal, obviously. But, unfortunately, the language has us kind of painted into a corner.”

As a result, overtime charges and ladder truck assists are likely to remain the only options until negotiations begin on the new firefighters’ contract. That contract would take effect in October 2018.

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