Freeport EMT discusses importance of EMS work
It’s not quite as dramatic as Hollywood makes it seem, but paramedic Tom Ulrey said he and his co-workers serve an important role in other’s lives.
Ulrey works with Freeport EMS, where he has been a part of the agency for eight years. Overall, Ulrey has been involved in emergency medical services in some capacity for two decades, dating back to his time as an EMT in Columbus, Ohio.
“It’s not like it is in the movies or on TV. You’re not going to have critical patients every day,” Ulrey said. “But you’re going to be able to make somebody’s day better every day.
“Even if somebody’s not critically ill, they're still having one of the worst days of their lives if they’re calling for an ambulance. Just being good to them and providing some reassurance is sometimes one of the most important things that you can do for them.”
That doesn’t mean Ulrey hasn’t seen his share of tougher situations during his 20 years of service. In one incident about a year ago, he said he was called to the scene of a car accident in Buffalo Township in the middle of a snowstorm.
“We had an elderly lady that lost control of her car in a snowstorm and rolled it over and she was pinned in there against a tree,” Ulrey said. “It actually took about three and a half hours to extricate her from the vehicle in the middle of a snowstorm.”
In another incident, Ulrey was part of a crew called to rescue a six-day-old boy who was hit in the head by a stray bullet.
“We were actually able to get him to Children’s Hospital alive,” Ulrey said.
The boy survived the incident.
Ulrey, who attended Hawkins College in Ohio, said the reason he ended up picking EMS was the number of job opportunities. He had debated becoming another type of first responder, a firefighter.
He said the industry, at least in Pennsylvania, has faced a staffing shortage for years. It escalated in the early 2020s.
“When COVID hit, it just made the problem worse. A lot of people were getting out of the business and not very many were coming in,” Ulrey said.
The schools that were providing training also started cutting back classes.
“It is better than it was in 2021,” he said. “We have seen a little bit of an increase of people coming in, but at the same time, it’s not where it needs to be.”
Compared to other EMS agencies that serve Butler County, Freeport EMS is relatively well-staffed, with “between 20 and 30 people” on staff, according to Ulrey. However, he said Freeport could still use some more bodies.
“Even at 20 or 30 employees, we still have a couple of open, full-time slots that we’d like to fill,” Ulrey said.
Ulrey said Freeport is not immune to the same financial and logistical issues facing every other emergency medical agency in Pennsylvania — stagnant reimbursements from insurance, rising costs of materials and the general unpredictability of running an EMS agency.
“The ambulance services have been dropping like flies over the last five to 10 years,” Ulrey said. “Across the board in EMS in this area, we’ve seen a 30-to-40% increase in wages in the past two to three years, as employers were trying to compete for employees.”
Ulrey said the entire EMS system will need to reinvent itself to attract new talent, especially from other sectors, such as nursing school.
“Ultimately, we’re going to have to realize that we have to increase insurance reimbursements to the point where employers can offer better pay and better benefits,” Ulrey said. “Chiefs in EMS want to pay their people more, but the money’s just not there with the current funding model that we have.
“We need to see an increase in wages to roughly equal what nurses are making. And then maybe we can draw more people into the business and actually have the staffing that we wish we did.”
