Justin Guido

EAST BRADY — Every person in the room at the first responder town hall agreed the state of emergency services in Pennsylvania was not great. The issue at hand was what to do about it.

How rural emergency service providers can remain solvent and retain qualified personnel was the big question facing the group assembled at the Northern Armstrong EMS building in East Brady Thursday night, Oct. 8. The group included volunteer fire and EMS personnel from across Western Pennsylvania, along with state Reps. Aaron Bernstine, R-8th, and Josh Bashline, R-63rd.

“This is a great event and a great opportunity,” Bernstine said. “It’s really an opportunity to listen and understand the things that are most relevant for firefighters and our EMS providers. We have to make it easier and profitable for these operations to work, and we're going to do everything we do to help them.”

Leading the discussion throughout the meeting was presenter Kristen Stoughton who laid out the stakes for everyone at the start of the night.

“I know of at least four different small ambulance services that I have personally worked with or spoken to that are genuinely at risk of their doors shuttering,” Stoughton said. “The domino effect that will occur if a rural ambulance station fails is going to directly result in lives lost.”

Although Stoughton hasn’t worked directly for an EMS or fire department, her company, Vargo Stoughton Consulting, assists agencies with grant funding. Stoughton said she had recently worked with Northern Armstrong EMS and the Marion Township Volunteer Fire Company.

In the hourlong presentation, Stoughton boiled Pennsylvania’s present EMS crisis to three core issues facing fire and emergency service departments: lack of reimbursements from insurance, lack of available grant funding opportunities to cover those reimbursements and inadequate talent retention and recruitment.

Addressing the first issue, event organizers handed out documents containing numerous examples of calls received by the Northern Armstrong EMS which were reimbursed at less than half the billed amount. In most cases, it cost the agency hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. Some calls from January and February have not been paid back at all.

“Is this a business model that's failing, or are we failing the business model? Because these are public servants,” Stoughton said.

In an apt illustration of the EMS crisis, in the middle of the town hall event, EMTs for Northern Armstrong EMS were called to an incident in Kittanning. Although the borough is outside of Northern Armstrong’s normal coverage area, they were the closest unit available.

“Northern Armstrong EMS is literally being called into Kittanning right now for mutual aid, because there's nobody left in Kittanning to take that call,” Stoughton said.

Acknowledging some of the headway being made in combating this shortage, Stoughton praised Butler County’s partnership with Butler County Community College to create an EMS Academy, training EMTs to counter the shortage of EMS personnel.

“I’m so excited and so proud of Butler County for the program that they have put in place with the EMS Academy that they have,” Stoughton said. “It is a fantastic program that I hope in some way, shape or form is seen across the state.”

While Stoughton left open the possibility of future multicounty EMS and fire meetings, she said the point of the meeting was to ultimately spur action on the EMS crisis from all parties.

“We need to find purpose,” Stoughton said. “We need to make sure that we find solutions, and I would love to hear back from people in that regard.”