Christopher Peak file photo
NHFD Paramedic Keith Kerr treats man who overdosed on heroin.
The number of paramedics employed by the city’s fire department has plummeted from around 40 a few years ago to just 15 today — hiking mandatory overtime and prompting the city to recruit workers from out of town and state.
Fire Chief John Alston and Assistant Fire Chief Daniel Coughlin delivered that sobering news at a budget workshop before the Board of Alders Finance Committee.
The workshop marked the latest step in local legislators’ review of Mayor Justin Elicker’s proposed $680 million general fund budget for Fiscal Year 2024 – 25 (FY25), which begins on July 1.
Alston, Coughlin, City Budget Director Michael Gormany, and Chief Administrative Officer Regina Rush-Kittle told the alders that the fire department’s budget would increase by around $415,000, from $39.9 million to $40.35 million, under the mayor’s proposal.
Included in that departmental budget would be a $410,000 increase in overtime, from $5.3 million to $5.71 million. The Elicker administration has proposed covering $400,000 of that $410,000 fire overtime bump with one-time soon-to-expire federal pandemic-relief dollars.
Alston, Coughlin, and Gormany said that the department currently has 53 vacancies among the 316 budgeted firefighter positions in its “fire suppression” ranks. Since the city fire union contract requires a minimum staffing of 72 firefighters at all times, Coughlin said, that means some 15 to 20 city firefighters working any given shift are usually working mandatory overtime. Which in turn stresses the department’s overtime budget.
Alston and Coughlin stressed over and over again during the workshop held at City Hall this past Thursday evening that one of the biggest staffing challenges the fire department has right now is in its dearth of paramedics.
Those city fire department staffers are trained and qualified not only to fight fires, but also in Advance Life Support (ALS). They have “a lot of life-saving skills that the average EMT doesn’t have,” including “cardiac monitoring” and the ability to intubate people, Coughlin told the Independent.
The city has three emergency medical units which, ideally, would be staffed by two paramedics each. They are more regularly staffed by one paramedic and one EMT, Coughlin said. Those three units respond to medical calls all over the city for everything from chest pain to difficulty breathing to seizures to overdoses. He said that the city’s Emergency 3 unit out of Goffe Street does “630 runs per month.” “Nationally, that’s mind blowing,” he told this reporter.
Alston told the committee alders that the fire department “normally” has between 48 and 50 paramedics in its ranks. In this 2018 article, the Independent reported that the fire department had 38 paramedics on staff at that time.
As of now, Alston and Coughlin told the alders, the department only has 15 paramedics.
“Paramedics are being ordered in [for overtime] at an alarming rate,” Coughlin said. “This is a national problem.”
He and Alston pointed to the fire department’s brand new designation of all fire fighter positions as “fire fighter / paramedic / lateral,” thanks to a Board of Alders position resdesignation approval granted late last year.
Just like with the police department, they said, that “lateral” designation allows the city’s fire department to recruit trained and certified paramedics from other cities and states to allow for a shorter on-boarding process with the New Haven Fire Department. Lateral paramedic recruits need to come to New Haven’s fire academy for only two months, Alston said. “We’re accelerating the process.”
He and Coughlin said that the city currently has five paramedic laterals in the academy, one of whom from is from Massachusetts, one from New York.
Alston also said that Yale New Haven Hospital Center for EMS now has an accelerated paramedic program that takes only one year and comes at a significant discounted price for those training to work for the New Haven Fire Department. Training to become a paramedic in Connecticut costs between $10,000 and $23,000. This Yale course costs $11,000.
These recruitment efforts are designed to beef up the city’s number of paramedics at a time of surging medical calls, and more and more burnout and PTSD among emergency medical providers who find themselves responding to such traumatic incidents as, for example, “fetal infant mortality.”
“When you have to order them in or hold them over for a shift,” Alston said about the city’s few remaining paramedics, “and they’re going out on medical calls over and over and over again, we worry about their mental health.” So, he continued, “lateral paramedics” — the ability to recruit certified paramedics from outside New Haven — “was a good move for us.”
I can understand why new members/new recruits would be hesitant to join the severely understaffed/overworked NHFD and why this would lead to "more burnout and PTSD among emergency medical providers..." But what caused the number of paramedics employed by the city’s fire department to plummet from around 40 a few years ago to just 15? Money, benefits, contract, workplace environment, etc.?