Mixed reviews for Poloncarz' 'State of the County' proposal for new ambulance service

Buffalo, NY (WBEN) - During his state of the county address Thursday, Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz proposed launching a new county ambulance service that would accentuate current emergency services.

The move, Poloncarz says, is aimed at addressing ambulance service shortfall in mainly rural areas of Erie County. Poloncarz noted during his address that the issue was brought to light in particular during the COVID pandemic.

In explaining the proposal in detail, Deputy Erie County Emergency Services Commissioner Greg Gill told WBEN a county run ambulance service would help surrounding areas that have difficulty in staffing in transporting patients. "The number of volunteers, the number of providers out there is decreasing. call volume is increasing. There's consistent mutual aid between different departments out there right now. And we believe that we have one service that's able to cover the whole county, it function as a backup to what's already existing," says Gill. He says each area is limited to where it can operate, so a county wide operating certificate can fill in some of the voids some of the gaps that are out there right now.

Gill says some of the smaller areas only have a few volunteers compared to commercial areas closer to metro Buffalo. He emphasizes this is not about replacing ambulance services in place. "I can't stress enough that we're here to assist them with not to replace anybody. We want to help them when they have some difficult times. Volunteers have to work during the day. And that decreases their ability to respond to calls. So if we could cover some peak times, that might take some of the workload, and eventually the burnout that might occur off their shoulders," notes Gill.

The county, Gill says, is also looking to expand paramedic training to increase the number of personnel available. He adds the county is looking to a nurse navigator program. "We're going to hire trained nurses that will sit at our dispatch center in Buffalo, and when calls come into the 911 centers in the different towns and areas that have the cause interrogated, and they find out how what the acuity of the patient is. And in services systems, what they can do is they can forward that to our nurse navigator if instead of a high acuity, and that nurse navigator can interrogate the call and see if there's alternate ways that the patient can be treated, not necessarily going to a hospital by ambulance," explains Gill.

Terry Clark of Twin City Ambulance raises some concerns about the proposal in a WBEN interview. Clark acknowledges additional EMTs and paramedics, are needed, but insists a new ambulance service is not. "I know, in this case, the county is looking at some additional training initiatives, that will be a good thing, but starting another service at this point actually will be detrimental," says Clark.

Clark draws a corollary to the situation in place in Niagara County. "We had plenty of staffing at Twin City. All the areas that we had agreed to cover service for, we were pretty much 100% availability," he said. The county added another service without adding people, Clark says, and that impacted Twi City's ability to staff ambulances. He says another situation in Lockport was brought about by a court order.

Clark says lack of personnel is a serious problem, not just here, but around the country. He says the first thing to alleviate that is to add more EMT classes so people have more choices, more availability of classes, and more convenience of those classes. "We definitely need another paramedic program. There's only one paramedic program in the greater Buffalo area, the next closest one, you have to go to Jamestown, to get into a paramedic program," notes Clark. Incentivizing new EMTs is also a possibility, he adds.

The Erie County Legislature must approve the new county-wide ambulance service.