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Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson announced today her decision to begin issuing fines to the county’s beleaguered ambulance contractor, American Medical Response.
“My patience is exhausted. AMR’s ambulance response times are unacceptable, and they have not met performance metrics in months, requiring that we take action,” she said in a press release. “We tried working with AMR to improve this situation without success. As a result, we’ve informed AMR today that we will be exercising our contractual authority to levy penalties for their ongoing noncompliance.”
AMR hasn’t been meeting response time goals for over a year, and has struggled to staff all of its ambulances amid a shortage of paramedics.
In May, WW learned that the county had declined to fine its contractor over its poor performance. The following month, WW reported that around 10% of the time an ambulance wasn’t immediately available to respond to 911 calls.
The decision follows a letter sent late July 28 by Gresham’s city council to county commissioners demanding they “take immediate action to rectify this dire situation.”
County Commissioner Sharon Meieran and AMR have both called on the county to relax its requirement that ambulances be staffed by two paramedics, allowing the contractor to replace one with a lesser-trained emergency medical technician.
“Neither county leadership nor the health department have provided any evidence that a two paramedic ambulance team in the context of our crisis—a dire shortage of paramedics resulting in an inability of ANY ambulances being available—is safer for patients or that this model will save lives compared with a one paramedic and one EMT staffing model,” Meieran wrote in an email to city leaders earlier today.
Multnomah County’s policy is unique among neighboring counties. But Aaron Monnig, county emergency medical services’ health officer operations manager, discounted that idea in an email sent to AMR’s union last month, arguing that the county is “fundamentally different” in that a city fire bureau paramedic does not also respond to every call.
Monnig recommended fining AMR, but noted various consequences. One will be to “financially destabilize” AMR, which is expected to pass on any fines in the form of “increased rates which will ultimately be passed on to the community,” Monnig explains.