Salaries, Strong Recruitment Ease Area Paramedic Shortage

To curb a critical shortage, fire departments across the Washington region have pursued paramedics like star athletes in recent years, enticing them with signing bonuses, handsome salaries and the promise of fast-track career paths.

Montgomery County hired a marketing expert and launched a national recruiting drive, reaching out in particular to women and minorities. Fairfax County offered top starting salaries, now totaling about $57,000 -- as much as 50 percent higher than some other local jurisdictions, though Fairfax paramedics generally work longer hours.

The increasingly sophisticated recruiting tactics have worked, fire officials say, turning around a shortage that gripped the region after the 1990s. During that decade, the number of medical-related 911 calls increased as the area's population grew by 16 percent and aged overall.

As a result of the efforts, response times to the most serious medical emergencies have improved significantly in many jurisdictions, according to data from the departments.

"We were getting worried," said Lt. Col. Karl L. Granzow of the Prince George's County Fire and Emergency Medical Services Department. "We were experiencing lot of attrition, and we were struggling with our capability for service as the community grew."

The department began offering new firefighters free paramedic training through a program at a community college, an effort that has helped to nearly double the number of paramedics and cut average response times in medical emergencies requiring advanced life support, or ALS, by more than a minute and a half. The initiative was successful enough that the county abandoned its aggressive recruitment efforts.

"We got into bidding wars with neighboring jurisdictions," Granzow said. "And that's not healthy."

Other departments targeted Pennsylvania and New York, areas with large pools of volunteer firefighters looking to switch to paying jobs. Loudoun County looked south and west after hearing that the Roanoke area had more people training to be paramedics at a community college than it had jobs.

In the past five years, the Fairfax County fire department has increased the number of paramedics by about 85 percent, improving response times slightly as its call volume has increased.

In roughly the same period, the D.C. fire department boosted its number of paramedics by almost 19 percent, lowering the average response time for ALS emergencies by 3 minutes, 21 seconds.

Montgomery nearly doubled its paramedic ranks during the past decade and improved emergency care in growing rural areas, such as Laytonsville, where the addition of a single paramedic cut the response times for ALS emergencies by about three minutes.

Experts say those minutes can mean life or death for the most critical patients: victims of heart attacks, car crashes and assaults.