My essential question is What is it like to work in private paid EMS? This question is something that has a few answers some of which are well known. Burnout is extremely high amongst EMS professionals, as employees of the company or agency they are working for they are overwhelmingly not treated well, and in a majority of the country (New York City being no exception and actually known to be worse than some places) are compensated extremely poorly. As an EMT myself I have quite a lot of insight into what it is like to respond to the same types of calls that my paid, full-time counterparts are. This is something that can be extremely taxing at times and doing it every day for years on end would only compound this. The other challenge for the career EMTs and Medics is something that I have less experience with, abrasive management and poor pay are things that I have not yet had to deal with. This is in part luck of the draw where I ended up originally the management is excellent and I got a sought after position. I also went into it with the understanding and intention that I would be unpaid. Part of being an EMT is talking to a lot of different people. Patients, nurses, doctors, medics, and other EMTs and from all these interactions I get to understand a lot about what others lives are like in a way most people aren’t able to.

What I don’t know is why EMTs and Medics suffer from such high rates of burnout, why they are compensated so poorly and why management of EMS systems, in particular, is so poor. I want to be able to understand these in order to teach others and raise awareness about the problems that exist behind the curtains. Most of the general public’s interactions with police, fire, and EMS begins with a 911 call and ends with someone coming to solve their problem or attempt to solve it. There is no attention paid to the fact that of the three types of people who responded to the scene, one of them gets paid half of what the other two do for no apparent reason. This is a question that should have been addressed publicly a long time ago but for whatever the political reason is has not been and that is what I am trying to help solve and figure out.