Alexandria Fire Chief's Plan for Dual Training Ignites Concerns

A group called the Alexandria Professional Medics Association (APMA) announced Thursday that its members oppose City of Alexandria Fire Chief Robert Dubé’s plan to make changes to how emergency medical services are delivered to the residents and visitors of the City.

The fire chief is proposing that medics be dual-trained in emergency medical care and fighting fires and according to the fire department Web site:

• Single-role medics who choose not to cross-train will continue to be utilized in the system to provide ALS care. As these individuals retire or separate from the system, they will be replaced by cross-trained, dual role employees.
• The Fire Chief notes the proposed plan is the same response model used by Fairfax County and Arlington and follows nationally accepted best practices for fire-based EMS delivery.

“The Alexandria Fire Department has a history of providing high-quality, award-winning emergency medical care to this great City,” said APMA President Lonnie Phillips. “The Fire Chief’s plan will not improve the quality of care, and some of these changes have in fact already negatively impacted the City’s residents and visitors.”

The group of medics opposing the plan say that under the new plan, they’re required to work 33 percent longer each week once they’re trained as firefighters, working longer hours (56 hours a week which includes some sleeping) before overtime kicks in and some of its members prefer to work as medics and don’t want to fight fires, according to Phillips.

Members from the group had no success getting their points across in a July 29 meeting with the Chief and hope to bring their concerns to City Council in September, Phillips said.

Phillips says that a cadre of female medics who do not want to train as firefighters may file a discrimination suit. About two-dozen women are employed as medics by the fire department, Phillips said.

According to the group, the Fire Chief’s plan “reduces medic staffing on ambulances in order to staff ’firefighter medics’ on fire engines. It also eliminates the positions of the non-firefighter advanced life support (ALS) providers who have dedicated their careers to providing emergency medical care in order to create more firefighter positions—even though the vast majority of incidents the Fire Department responds to are medical emergencies.”

The group warns that the Fire Chief’s plan “will not improve EMS delivery in the City. Instead, it will dilute the high-level of care that has been provided by the Department for four decades, cost the City more, and unfairly burden one group of employees: the civilian medics who have dedicated their careers to helping City residents and visitors.”

The group goes on to say that the Fire Chief’s plan “also ignores years of evidence and best practices in emergency medical services around the world. The leading EMS experts, and EMS agencies across the nation, now recognize the high cost—and questionable benefit—of sending heavy fire apparatus to provide anything but first response (i.e., basic life support) care on the scene of a medical emergency. By ignoring the evidence, Chief Dubé is choosing to spend more but achieve less.”

For more information on how the Fire Chief’s plan hurts the residents and visitors of Alexandria, visit SaveAlexEMS.com or contact the APMA at Info@SaveAlexEMS.com.

To read the Fire Chief’s plan, visit the City Web page here.