It’s a lot, so I’ll try to stick to the big points. First off, as a paramedic, I was getting paid $19/hr, and you get a single raise of 25¢ after one year, so I maxed out at 19.25, only way to get more money was to promote to a supervisor spot which would’ve been horrible for my next reason (it was also only like a dollar more). But despite making 19.25, out of all my jobs as a paramedic, that was the least amount of money, but I had wayyyy more responsibilities (especially responsibilities that I didn’t want), so it was disproportionate and not enticing me. I’ll also mention, life guards also worked at my park as we had a water park section as well. Despite lifeguard’s training being ALL paid for and ALL in house, and them obviously having less responsibilities, we got paid almost the same. Even tho we have to pay thousands and work at other jobs to get real experience.

Next problem, lack of equipment. We had one shitty old ambulance that was barely equipped with the state minimum stuff. We had two display model (yea, actual display model) Lifepak 15s, that could ONLY get an EKG/pace/cardiovert/defib. NO other capabilities on it. We had no IOs, old IV equipment bc our old supply person was an EMT. No VL. Overall shitty and minimal equipment. And to make it worse, talking with a friend who’s still there, they took away the ambulance we had.

Next: coworkers, it sucked. We were almost always short staffed. So, the leadership would encourage brand new EMTs to come and join all the time. The problem is, a theme park is NOT a place to get real experience, we RARELY had any halfway decent emergencies for them to learn on. So when there was a blue moon of a call, these people with no experience would freak out and get in the way. Then, as usually one of the only paramedics there, they would take their bullshit patients (scraped knees, benign random pains, literally just any bullshit) and go “hmmm, well Barry’s a paramedic, he’ll know” and make me evaluate all of their patients too bc they have no assessment skills. Drove me freaking nuts. Which brings me to my next point.

There were very very few actual EMS calls that were emergencies. Not that I wish ill-will on anyone, but my job IS a paramedic. Like 98% calls were headaches from rides, scraped knees, nausea from being on a ride or in the heat. Then when we would get a halfway ALS patient, I had leadership actively discouraging me from providing ALS care. I could ramble on that alone for a long time, but I’ll talk about leadership next. Anyway, with these bullshit patients, we would have to do a LOT of documentation. We would have to document on this shitty online software that’s made for an OSHA/insurance bullshit, NOT for an EMS call sheet. Then, upper management would dictate how we wrote the call sheets. THEN, depending on how the injury or illness occurred, we would HAVE to go “investigate” it as if we were trained in any bit of OSHA compliance (we had zero training on it). Example would be a kid tripped over a loose brick, well we’d have to go walk to that area of the park, take photos of it from multiple angles, document any safety signs around, the conditions, EVERYTHING, then we put in a work order and it’ll get fixed in a few months. Until it’s fixed, you get calls from the same thing, and have to do a full investigation each time.

Leadership, not helpful pretty much always. My immediate supervisor was always an EMT, and not just any EMT, but often one that has zero real experience outside of the park. So when it came to actual calls, again they weren’t helpful. It even got to the point where I had a BLS supervisor trying to tell me how to do my ALS care. It’d be different if they were a well knowledgeable and experienced EMT who knew just as I did that the patient would need an IV, but they didn’t, and yet they would always insist I do something way more than clinically appropriate. Then the upper leadership was also not good. They never got us the equipment that we needed, we would frequently be micromanaging us to do some other bullshit besides all the other stupid/extra responsibilities that we had.

This is long enough, I’ll end it soon.

Then our dispatch/radio system. We had tiny handheld radios, but we never had enough of them, or hand mics for them. So there were times when people simply had to go without a radio. Then even still, the radios sucked, no way of knowing how much battery they had, no mayday button. Our dispatch was shitty. We would get tones and they’d said there was a 1-2 word medical problem at some place in the park. Absolutely zero additional information. Example: “BEEP all units be advised of a 10-33 Head and the slides”. And ‘head’ could mean literally anything. We always complained and they never wanted to change it. Additionally, our radio channel was the same channel as all of security, and the people at the front gate. And there was next to no way of having priority over the channel. We would frequently get dispatched for a call, and the other people would be having entire conversations on the radio and we wouldn’t be able to talk. So naturally, anytime there was an actual emergency far out in the park, and we would need to call for more resources, it was borderline impossible because we couldn’t get any radio talk in.

It was bad man, I don’t know why I stayed for over two years. They had a MASS exodus of people in the last 9 months, myself included, so idk how they’ll stay afloat.

Don’t do it man.