Thursday, December 14, 2006

Louisiana?!

So I accepted a job drilling for oil in offshore in Louisiana (details not so relevant), which I may or may not report to come June, but anyway, I was browsing for apartments and the like in the towns around Lafayette. Interestingly around, this is my first major move in around four years, which is a little more than the total time I've been involved with EMS. So I was surprised when I discovered myself looking first for towns that had volunteer EMS squads and fire departments as the primary criteria of where I might want to go live. Oddly enough, I found out that many towns (in fact all of them) are serviced by a single commercial ambulance company. Investigating further, I discovered that much of the entire STATE of Louisiana's EMS system is this single outfit.

Now, there are many volley fire gigs, but most of the fire gigs don't do EMS, as evidenced by the online lists of members with only one or two members at most being certified as EMT-Bs. I'm a little disconcerted about this situation, and as much as I like working the fire service, EMS was always (and I hope forever will be) my primary emergency gig. This is quite a conundrum since I swore that I work never work commercial EMS. This quandary turns out to be the principle misgiving of moving from New York City to Louisiana. Anyway, two concerns: (1) I hope the single commercial ambulance outfit that runs everything down there has good QA/QI because they own the business, and no one has a choice to the EMS they get. (2) I wonder if they hire per diem Basics who spend 3 weeks a month offshore?