Kern County has been considering a bit of a change in their community as far as EMTs and Paramedics. While the Hall Ambulance Service has long been part of the County, ever since 1971, where they employ around 460 people. Yet, there’s reports that officials aren’t fulfilling the community needs.
During a recent Kern County Board of Supervisors meeting, there have been representatives from Hall Ambulance addressed the challenges that the service has been having to meet their staffing needs.
Such a drop in EMTs for Kern County have been causing Hall to be more diverse with recruiting techniques. Recently there have been successful tactics for the 15-year partnership with Bakersfield College that would operate via the in-house EMT training program. In the current landscape, there are not nearly sufficient amounts of paramedics at the local colleges, which therefore creates similar programs.
For potential EMTs and paramedics, the Harvey L. Hall Academy had been made to support people who are known for first responders as a challenge. It tends to be difficult to find a paramedic these days as the market is lean with a lack of participants.
However, there have been increases, between 2018 and 2021, while also dropping once more in 2022. There have been about 24 EMTs that were hired, while the number of program graduates has also been dropping. As it turns out, it’s only been 7 in 2021 and 2 in 2022.
In the interim, there’s the whole process of recruiting many more employees, where Hall had to exceed the budget to support the workers who had been previously employed. Hall had therefore achieved a payroll budget of around $36 million while only spending an additional $7 million on payroll hours alone.
There had been 28,000 hours of EMT and paramedic times purchased for the community of Bakersfield.
There’s an imbalance of employees as increased wages had been brought up by 6.5 percent in addition to pushing a huge social media promotional campaign, which in itself could create a wider emphasis on mental wellness for paramedics and EMTs.
It doesn’t quite matter who the first responder can be, as long as there have been commitments to allow the employees to stay healthy and continue working. But becoming an EMT is an accessible possibility for anyone interested in Hall Academy as applications have been continually accepted for academy students to complete field internships that can qualify for the training programs.
