The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically worsened a nationwide staffing shortage for emergency medical technicians and paramedics, bringing longstanding issues \u2014 including low federal reimbursement rates and salary constraints \u2014 to a head in an industry already dealing with extremely high turnover.<\/p>\n
The shortages have led to response time delays and longer waits offloading patients in hospitals.<\/p>\n
According to a survey conducted by the American Ambulance Association, the turnover among paramedics and EMTs ranges from 20 to 30 percent annually, resulting in an unsustainable 100 percent turnover every four years.<\/p>\n
Staffing has long been a problem, but COVID-19 made things worse, hitting the pipeline of new recruits hard. Training programs paused or shut down entirely, and the National Registry of EMTs stopped its certification testing.<\/p>\n
Another issue:<\/strong>\u00a0The pandemic has opened up opportunities for paramedics to work in other health environments\u00a0because wages are better.<\/p>\n Entry-level paramedics and EMTs at some private companies are only making $14 to $15 an hour, which is considered high.<\/p>\n Companies can’t charge insurers more because so many patients are on Medicare and Medicaid, which are reimbursed at a fixed rate, so there’s a ceiling.\u00a0 Agencies rely on payments from commercial insurance and patients to make up the difference.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically worsened...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41597"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41597\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41598,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41597\/revisions\/41598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}