by Doug La Rocque
Injured or sick, call for an ambulance and keep your fingers crossed one will show up in a reasonable amount of time. That is perhaps a bit of an overstatement, but it bears out the frustration that Brunswick residents, emergency service personnel, and Town officials are feeling. To that end, the Brunswick Town Board held a workshop meeting on Tuesday, August 30, with a representative of the Cambridge Rescue Squad, the County’s 911 center coordinator, and members of area fire departments.
Call for an ambulance in Brunswick and the arrival time might be as little as five minutes or perhaps 30 minutes or longer. As was discussed, 30 minutes might be ok if it is not a life-threatening situation, but what if it is? So what is the root of the problem? The answer is the number of ambulances available in the County at any given time and that is determined by staffing.
The Eastwick Press has reported on the difficulty volunteer and even paid ambulance services are having recruiting and retaining Emergency Medical Technicians (EMT). Part of the problem is the enormous amount of training required just to become an EMT along with volunteer time on a rescue squad. In this day and age, even those willing to give of themselves to their community may not have that much time available.
More and more, volunteer ambulance services are falling by the wayside, with communities like Brunswick depending upon a paid service to fill the gap. Many years ago Brunswick had a volunteer service run by the Eagle Mills Fire Department, but that ceased more than two decades ago. Since then, the Town has relied upon the Mohawk Ambulance Service, for a while paying for Mohawk to garage an ambulance in the Town. That worked relatively well for some time but Mohawk then constructed its own station on McChesney Avenue, able to accommodate up the eight vehicles. Mohawk’s initial plans were to try to keep at least one ambulance in the station during the day to serve Brunswick and rural Rensselaer County while the rest were stationed around Troy and other Capital Region localities. According to Brunswick Supervisor Phil Herrington, because of Mohawk’s contractual obligations, that is often no longer the case.
Critical Response Times
As was mentioned in the beginning of this report, a minor illness or injury may not require an emergency response but what if it is a stroke or cardiac related? These calls not only require an ambulance, but a paramedic (or ALS) response as well. Besides Mohawk or Empire ambulances, there are only five other ALS ambulance services in the County. So if Mohawk or Empire’s paid services are not available, the call rolls to mutual aid. First up for Brunswick, depending on the location, are the Hoosick Valley or North Greenbush ambulances. Hoosick Valley does not have an abundance of staffing and North Greenbush has a high volume of calls in their own town. Thus, they may not have an ambulance available while leaving their own service area protected, and do not respond. The same can be said for the Sand Lake ambulance, leaving the Bruen Rescue Squad in East Greenbush as the only other ALS service available, and there is the added problem of distance as well as availability here. When all ALS services are exhausted, the call rolls to a BLS (EMT) service, with either Grafton or Pittstown usually the first called. But they have their own staffing problems, and sometimes cannot get an ambulance off the floor.
So Now What?
The Board members talked about two potential solutions. One would be to outright contract with Mohawk to provide a dedicated ambulance for Brunswick, either BLS or ALS. This would be costly, with the Town and Mohawk currently discussing pricing. The other option would be for the Town to form its own ambulance corps, starting small with volunteers, then moving to part-time paid staff and eventually a hybrid of full-time paid personnel and volunteers. This is where the representative from the Cambridge Rescue Squad came into play. Mark Spiezio outlined for the Board members how they started and just how they operate now, servicing their communities, recruiting and retaining personnel, as well as staying financially afloat.
What Brunswick would have to do to emulate Cambridge and work with its current EMS fire department response, as well as understand the financial commitment from the Town, will require some more research. Since this meeting happened just hours before press time, the rest of the story will appear in next week’s edition.
