Nursing Homes Spending Thousands With Private Ambulance Companies by Arthur L Burton III

Nursing Homes are spending thousands on Private Ambulances

By Arthur L Burton III

There many different Private owned Ambulance Companies in NYC that make their money supplying Emergency Medical Services to Nursing Homes. They bid for contracts with Nursing Homes and they charge to be on call to these Nursing Homes in emergencies. There is a serious problem with this type of service, one it is very costly and second the transport EMT worker might not be experienced in the event of an emergency. Transport EMT workers for Private Ambulance companies main function is taking a non-critical patient from the Nursing Home or mental institution to the Hospital. Corporations like Transcare pay their workers $10.00 to $12.00 per hour but charge on average about $500.00 per transport. The private ambulances have been the emergency transport for Nursing Home Residents regardless of the medical emergency. To some this seems like good business sense but in fact, if you have a family member in a Nursing Home you would want them to get the best care possible. This care should include emergency transport to the Hospital when they are ill. Most nursing home residents suffer with sepsis and GI bleeds and use plenty of medications that a Transport EMT would not know why a patient is taking a certain medication. The Truth is that the majority of the time EMT workers don not need to know what a medication does, but there are times in an emergency that medicine can give symptoms that might be misunderstood by the transport EMT because of their unfamiliarity of what the side effects the medicine causes.

The problem with all of this is the standard of care that a resident of a Nursing Home receives when being transported to the Hospital. In fairness this is article is not suggesting to get rid of private ambulances but to make persons aware that a transport EMT should not be called in extreme emergencies like cardiac arrest and severe cases of difficulty breathing.

There are a few other factors but this one seems to be the most obvious. Private ambulance companies cannot park their vehicle in an emergency room’s Ambulance bay at most Hospitals. The Private Ambulance Company are instructed to park their ambulance along the street and then the patient is to be taken out and rolled several feet to the emergency room entrance regardless of weather. Imagine you are a resident who is sleeping in pajamas, wakes up not feeling well and you inform the nurse. The Resident’s are took from the Nursing Homes in the rain, snow and freezing cold with just a sheet around them. If this sounds fictional just look at some of the hospitals around your neighborhood and you can see that this is sad but true fact.

Nursing Homes who are responsible for the care of their residents do not seem to know that an FDNY Ambulance might be the better solution in certain emergencies. Some transport EMT worker’s are not familiar with the suction machine inside their ambulance. This is important because some elderly Nursing Home patients suffer from GI Bleeds or vomiting in route to the emergency room. Private Ambulance Companies should not take for granted that since the EMT has passed their certification exam that they know how to use all equipment, when in reality there is only a small section on Ambulance operations. This could prove fatal if a patient is vomiting and the EMT does not know how to use the equipment. The level of care needs to improve with Private Ambulance Companies to ensure that they have the best interest of the patients at heart. Private Ambulance companies are more business orientated because when a call is made for critical care lights and sirens are not to be used without proper authorization from a private ambulance company dispatcher who is not an EMT, but worried more about complaints of sirens being used then the patients care.