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Health & Fitness

It's unwise to Privatize

Your EMS Provider Should Care More About Your Safety Than Profits

  

I’ve grown up spending countless hours at my grandparents’ house in Coventry Center and for the last two and a half decades my wife and I have chosen to raise our family here in Coventry as well. I am a Lieutenant on Rescue #7 in Central Coventry.  I hold a certification as a firefighter, Paramedic and I am also a licensed professional nurse.  I have worked in the emergency medical field for nearly four decades as well as several Hospitals and emergency centers.  I have worked for Central Coventry Rescue for over thirty years, both as a volunteer and now as a paid firefighter/EMT.  I have also worked for several private ambulance companies over the years.

 

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The men and women that I work with here in Coventry are your Central Coventry fire fighters and are also your friends and neighbors. And as members of this community we too are genuinely concerned about your safety.  Actually it’s also our job to worry about your safety and welfare.

 

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That’s why we need to tell and spread the word to the citizens of Central Coventry why handing over emergency medical services to a private, for-profit EMS company is bad for public safety and bad for all taxpayers.  In the end it will cost you so much more.

 

As a past employee of several different private ambulance companies, I can say with certainty that Private ambulance systems provide services to make money.  In most cases, these private, for-profit companies are staffed with very young, new and inexperienced EMT’s just looking to enter the world of EMS.   These companies survive by compensating these “green” employees at the lowest entry level pay that they can.  By doing so, private EMS systems also experience high employee turnover rates, forcing them to rely on less-qualified and less-experienced personnel to do the job.

 

When you have a medical emergency, do you want the people coming to your rescue to care more about money than your life?   Private EMS services are driven by bottom line profits over quality patient care and continuity of patient care.

 

I know that I and my co-workers did not choose fire fighting and EMS to make a lot of money. To the contrary, we are called to this noble profession because we want to help people and we have a genuine concern and desire to do so.  We consider our profession as a career, not as a job.

 

Over the years, the Central Coventry Fire District has invested tens of thousands of dollars per employee with training and educating me and the other firefighters and EMT’s to be able to serve and assist our community in all kinds of emergencies.  We have the training needed to provide you with the best in pre-hospital care and to save lives. And because most, if not all of us have lived and served in this community for many years, we have experience that cannot be duplicated by any out-of-state private ambulances services.

 

We recognize that times are tough … but our proposal to balance the budget and maintain the public safety the people in this community have come to know and rightfully deserve was unnecessarily rejected by the Fire District Board. 

 

In the interest of public safety, for-profit EMS firms are not the answer. There is a better way.

 

I ask you to please take a moment today and to e-mail or call the Central Coventry Fire District Board and ask them to stop their unsafe and costly plan to liquidate the Fire District and to privatize our EMS system.

 

Board President, Fred Gralinski         fredccfd@gmail.com              401-480-5561

Vice President, Marie Baker              marieccfd@gmail.com           401-258-8729

 

Sincerely,

 

Michael DeCesare, EMT-P, LPN

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