LANESBOROUGH, Mass. — The Ambulance Enterprise Fund Committee hopes to add a paid employee for the town's emergency medical services in response to staffing shortages.

 

The board plans to present to the Finance Committee about adding someone who will work five days a week from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. for the ambulance service.

 

"I think the mindset that needs to swing is, no matter how many calls you're doing, you're not going to pay for this coverage with user fees," said Jennifer Weber board member and director of EMS.

 

Weber said currently, Lanesborough's ambulance service, a part of the Lanesborough Fire Department, is working primarily on an on-call basis. She said having someone work from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. would work best because that's when most calls are coming.

 

"I have a roster of ten, but there are no set call times, so you don't sign up to be on call," she said. "It's just if you can go, you go. It's just as unpredictable as everything else we do."

 

Fire Chief Jeff DeChaine said an increase in call volume for the department's ambulance service has made adding more full-time staff more feasible.

 

"It just wasn't cost-effective [before], because we weren't getting the revenue because, maybe back then, you would do call a day between fire and EMS. So they were they could go two or three days and never do a call," he said. "Now, we're up to over 500 between the two and the majority of them are EMS. It starts to shift the other way now. Even if we're going somewhere else, we're still getting the call and doing transport, we're generating revenues.

 

Weber said a proposal in the state senate could make this waiver permanent for municipalities of under 5000 people, meaning Lanesborough would qualify. DeChaine said the department wanted this for a long time.

 

"We pushed for that for years and years and years," he said. "And unfortunately, it took COVID to put that ball into play. And it has really been a turning point in our whole program, to be able to go out and get those transports, where we were giving all of them away, because you ended up with one empty out of those ten that was able to go and you couldn't do anything except go in and stabilize."

 

Weber said the department has had to be creative to find ways to deal with staffing shortages. One example noted was an emergency state waiver that allows an EMT to ride with a trained first responder from the department.

 

"That's been helpful, but it's an emergency waiver, so it can go away," she said. "They did write into this way was that they have to give us 60 days notice before it's going to go away. Last time they tried to take it away in a week."