Fire Department to Hire New Paramedics

As part of an effort to reduce response time to local emergencies, the Sudbury Fire Department is interviewsing to hire their sixth and seventh fully licensed paramedic firefighter, Fire Chief Kenneth MacLean said. According to MacLean, the department is expecting to bring in the first of the new hires by early August.

The hires will be part of an ongoing process to develop the fire department's own in-house advanced life support (ALS) provider, a goal MacLean said they hope to achieve sometime this fall.  Currently, the majority of Sudbury's paramedical needs are met by a Cambridge-based company named Professional Ambulance but known as Pro-EMS. Pro-EMS began serving Sudbury and 12 other surrounding communities this February when Emerson Hospital began sub-contracting out its ALS services. The Pro-EMS crews are dynamically deployed—on the move—in order to give them the widest possible range, but sometimes it can turn out to be a lengthy wait for them to get to Sudbury, if they happen to be located elsewhere when an emergency call comes.

According to MacLean, it can take as long as eight extra minutes to wait for paramedics to arrive on scene.

"Pro-EMS is a great company," MacLean said, "but we are on the outskirts of the region. It takes less than four minutes for our ambulances to arrive on the scene, but can take as long as 12 minutes for paramedics to arrive."

The Sudbury Fire Department hired their first paramedic in 2009, and have hired four more since then. Eventually the goal is to have 16 firefighters with advanced EMT licenses so as not to have to rely on a third party to deploy paramedics to emergency sites.

"If we can send paramedics right out the door with every ambulance, we're going to have an even better response time, and an even safer community," MacLean said.