The Peterborough Ambulance has proposed a budget that includes four additional full-time paramedic positions, which department heads say they will need to move the service into the future.
“We’ve lost people with a very high skillset, to places where they’re able to do a lot of the same things they’re doing here, but with a full-time package,” said Peterborough Fire and Rescue Chief Ed Walker during a meeting of the Select Board and Budget Committee on Tuesday. “We’re at a point that the level of service that we have, we’re really looking at now having to create a system that allows us to hire, retain and further educate these people.”
The ambulance service is looking to increase its ability to provide pre-hospital critical care and to expand its current transfer services to hospitals outside of Monadnock Community Hospital, such as Catholic Medical Center. However, the current level of staffing isn’t enough to do that, said Walker. Adding four full-time paramedics would allow enough stabilization in the schedule for the department to move forward in some of these areas, he said.
The department is staffed with a part-time crew currently, said Walker, with only himself and Ambulance Chief Josh Patrick as full-time employees. After polling the ambulance employees, most indicated they would be willing to take a pay cut of $1.50 per hour in exchange for a full-time position with benefits, which would lessen the impact on the budget. Also, there would not be an overall increase in the hours that were being staffed, said Walker, as part-time hours would be replaced with full-time hours.
Currently, the department staffs enough people to run two full ambulances during the daytime hours, and one ambulance with on-call staff for a second ambulance during the night. It is the goal of the department to always have a paramedic available on the ambulance, and where that is impossible to have an advanced EMT.
The board and committee did not make any decision on Walker’s proposal on Tuesday, but will take it under consideration in the budget process moving forward.