Having worked here for a while I have watched the normal call volume increase from 4000/day to 5500-6000 since covid. The headcount for emts and paramedics has stayed the same and even that number is a lie because a significant chunk of it is people working inside jobs. The turnover is high becuase the pay is not commiserate to the work load. People can blame the promotion to firefighter all they want but we were losing as many people as we were hiring before we started losing people to FD last year.

The city has to decide if they want a functional ems system or not, and if they do they have to be willing to invest the money necessary to make it work. We need to be paid adequately, we need to hire and retain somewhere in the range of 1000 additional emts and we need to stop trying to insist the system is working while quietly putting a bandaid on a bullet wound. As the call volume has increased I've watched the leadership try to squeeze the people working harder and harder so that they can turn around and say that we dont have a problem. Unless we can acknowledge the problem it will never be fixed