Letter Sent To the Public Safety Sub-Committee June 16, 2022

From: Andrew Albert

Sent: Tuesday, June 14, 2022 10:52 AM

To: Askham Sean ; Manager Town

<townmanager@simsbury-ct.gov>

Subject: Complaint SVAA

To the Public Safety Committee,

This complaint has been growing over some time now. As you are seemingly all aware the towns need for emergency medical response has been growing steadily and that need is not going away any time soon. Simsbury Ambulance has been providing emergency medical services to the town for many years, but there are a lot of things going on behind the scenes that are very worrisome and disheartening to find out about. Days where Ms. Stewart places herself on a truck on a 7 am7pm shift are more often than not limited to 9 am- 3pm and not reflecting what has been placed on the actual schedule for a car 17 shift. Ms. Stewart has been in the office on duty and in

'uniform" wearing an SVAA t-shirt with her radio on sitting on her desk when calls for service go out and will not respond. There is a fully stocked Advanced Life Support fly car on the days that there is no Car 17 yet there have been calls for motor vehicle accidents, chest pain, unresponsive individuals, and cardiac arrest that she has listened to mutual aid ambulances respond to with prolonged response times and has not even gotten out of her chair. She is a licensed paramedic in the state of Connecticut and has a Duty to Act and has failed both that duty and her responsibility to the residents of the town of Simsbury.

I know that recently the Ambulance Association has been asking for funding for a new ambulance and I would behoove the town to reconsider as Ms. Stewart is giving guaranteed overtime to particular employees at her discretion. These decisions are costing the ambulance tens of thousands of dollars every year. And for her position she is making close to, if not more than 125 -thousand including bonuses and has had extremely minimal patient interactions over the past year. There have been several days during the week, Monday through Friday where Ms. Stewart should be in the building but has not even shown up or if she does show up it is only for a short time and not the eight hour day you would expect and this is without working any road shifts or making up the hours in any other way that is visible to any of the employees. There is zero oversight within this organization to hold them accountable for these actions.

These practices are dangerous and have negative outcomes for patients. Ms. Stewart is the first person to speak about "chute times" and how quickly the first ambulance responds but has failed to mention how many calls for service that she was available to first respond to and has chosen not to. The employees at SVAA recently voted in a Union for the hope that it would hold the leadership at SVAA more accountable. Speak with as many employees as you can at SVAA and think you would find some of the information that have found from them shocking.

Thank you for your time,

Concerned Citizen