EMS station renovations improve conditions for an industry with a high attrition rate

Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services has been seeing staffing shortages since the pandemic, due to a combination of low pay, difficult working conditions and recruitment from other health care sectors. The vacancy rate has been improving – in July 2022 it was around 25 percent, and in 2023 it dropped to 17 percent. Still, at a Public Safety Commission meeting Monday, EMS Chief of Staff Wesley Hopkins noted that the current vacancy rate sits at 18 percent as of June 2024 – not a great improvement. Those shortages contribute to a reliance on overtime, which increased 16 percent last year, the Austin Monitor reported at the time. 

Of the 31 cadets graduating the most recent academy, 27 are entry-level medics, with only four being hired directly into the paramedic position. That’s a problem for retention prospects, since entry-level medics make up the majority of resignations: 37 medics resigned and seven retired this year, and the majority of departures happen within less than a year or within one to five years of service, Hopkins said. 

Commissioner Timothy Ruttan noted that the number of resignations this year is higher than normal, which Hopkins confirmed: “We are running four academies a year – that entry-level position typically don’t have to have experience. This is a gateway into the system. And so with that, we see these folks who have got some school, and they come in and they go through the academy, and then they realize that this job isn’t for them. Or they move here from out of state and then move back home.”

To address the retention issue, the city did increase pay for entry-level EMTs back in 2022 by 12 percent, to $22 an hour. However, Commissioner Rebecca Bernhardt noted, “It seems like that might not have been sufficient.” At the time, Austin EMS Association President Selena Xie told The Austin Chronicle the lack of competitive pay has directly contributed to the vacancy rate, and she was pushing for $24 an hour. Hopkins answered that the pay increase has helped in recruiting, but the retention issue is just a facet of the job: “picking up from your hometown and moving here (it’s hard to) make ties into the community.” EMS would like to get to 40 medics graduating from each academy, and Hopkins said this academy’s 31 “is a pretty good number. I think at this juncture, it’s probably prudent to watch it.”

Luckily, by October and November of this year, a 2018 $25 million bond for EMS renovations will add better accommodations for medics to several stations, meant to improve working conditions. For example, EMS Station 13 in the Cameron Road and Rundberg Lane area was originally a fire station, and “the EMS portion was added as an afterthought,” Hopkins said. “This station was the highest out of the 2018 bond on our priority list because the way that it was built, the crews really had two options to access their ambulance – through a men’s locker room or to disturb a communal sleep room and wake up the entire station if they were going on a call.” The renovations offer individual sleeping rooms and modernized shift change rooms, and add more ambulances to dense high-call-volume areas like South First Street and Ben White Boulevard, but overall “better privacy and better accommodations for our medics,” Hopkins said. 

Crucially, some renovations add more mental health support to underserved areas. One station at Koenig Lane and Lamar Boulevard “will actually allow us to add two ambulances, but also a community health paramedic or mental health responder, again to a very dense area. This station coming online is going to help bridge that gap, which we’ve had for a while.” Another at Loyola Lane and U.S. Highway 183 is technically not in the city of Austin, but in the extraterritorial jurisdiction.

“Because of the renovations, we were able to add a community health paramedic or mental health responder,” Hopkins said. “We realized by our heat maps that we really needed that asset in this area.”

Photo made available through a Creative Commons license.

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