Mutual Aid
By Albert B. Kelly
One thing that has worked really well over the years for people in almost every community is the idea of “mutual aid” on the part of first responders and particularly those involving fire and EMS. If you are not familiar with the concept of mutual aid, it is the idea that when a community needs help, whether fighting fires or responding to ambulance calls their neighbors would help meet the need of the moment with the understanding that the favor would be returned when needed.
I’ve always admired the mutual aid framework and my guess is that over the years, it was done with a handshake and a simple understanding that if help was needed for whatever reason- help would be provided with no questions asked. Each community, whether they used paid first responders, volunteers, or some combination of both, existed to protect the community.
But like many aspects of community life, things change and become more complicated. This has certainly been the case when it comes to EMS services. Years ago, it was simply about transport and getting someone to a doctor and whatever help might be rendered and similar to the days of horse-drawn carriages and the bucket brigades, the key ingredient was a willingness to do it rather than specialized training.
But as the body of knowledge and technology evolved, firefighting and EMS became more technical and complicated as well as more demanding, and these fields became specialized areas. This evolution included changing standards with best practices along with new equipment, new risks and liabilities, and a whole new set of new expectations on the part of the public.
All of this translates into a serious investment of money, whether tax dollars or otherwise and because it does, there is a lot of pressure to find cost effective ways to provide these services, particularly EMS services which are needed 24/7. One model being tried out these days in small communities in our county is privatizing EMS. A couple of townships have signed on with Inspira with others in the future being potential clients. The goal is to pay a low flat rate for EMS services as opposed to trying to staff and equip individual squads for full coverage.
This makes sense for very small communities, but it comes with a different set of concerns. For a private entity providing what is essentially a public service, it ultimately has to be about making the numbers work and this will involve a series of hard decisions like whether they will have dedicated service, meaning equipment and personnel stationed in and for a given community 24/7 exclusively or whether they’ll split that difference and use the same equipment and personnel to cover multiple client-communities.
These decisions might involve calculations as to whether staffing and equipment will be exclusive to a community only during specific hours or shifts each day, but not so much in whatever are deemed to be off-peak hours or periods that show less demand historically. These are not easy decisions because they pit bottom line economic calculations against the public’s expectation that when they pick up the phone to call 911, their call will be the priority with all that this implies.
Such decisions must also impact mutual aid considerations. If a private company providing EMS services will only have dedicated equipment and personnel in a given client-community during the day for example, but their equipment and personnel at night will be serving multiple client-communities, is the assumption that mutual aid, i.e. squads funded by a specific group of taxpayers, will make up for any gaps in coverage? For a community like Bridgeton, it’s not that we won’t provide mutual aid because we will; but such aid should be a measure of last resort, not built into staffing and coverage assumptions.
But EMS contracts aside, for those of us on the western side of Cumberland County, whether it’s Inspira handling EMS calls for client-communities or a municipal squad providing the service in their own and other communities with occasional mutual aid calls, one thing that would help is allowing the old Bridgeton Hospital ER to be the destination on this side of the county rather than the Vineland facility. This would cut response times considerably and make for a more seamless EMS framework. This might not fit bottom line calculations at first glance, but if the priority is service to the public it’s a possibility that should be reexamined.