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Four Vilas County towns consider forming EMS District as solution to volunteer shortages

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While EMS workers are trained to respond to a medical crisis, the industry is having a crisis of its own.

A report from the Wisconsin Office of Rural Health found 41% of EMS agencies report periods in their schedules where they did not have enough staff to respond to an ambulance call.

In ten communities in the state, there were times when someone called for an ambulance that never came because of staffing issues.

Four towns in northwest Vilas County are considering combining resources to help prevent this.

Boulder Junction, Manitowish Waters, Presque Isle, and Winchester all depend on volunteers for their EMS services.

The problem they’re facing, like a lot of communities in the country, is that they don’t have enough people to cover all their shifts.

EMS volunteers in the four towns try to cover shifts for one another, but it’s not a viable solution and certainly not a long-term one.

Steve Herzberg is a volunteer EMT who splits his time between Manitowish Waters and Sonoma County, California.

“We don’t have enough responders to cover these four towns unless all of us who respond are on call 24/7, every day. That’s really a lot to ask of us. It means that I can’t sit down and have a beer with my dinner without wondering if someone else will be able to respond to a call. When I go out fishing, I worry about how far I can go from my dock because I don’t know that we have enough people to respond,” said Herzberg.

The town boards hired a consulting firm to find a solution.

Dana Sechler with Strategic Management and Consulting presented those solutions during a community meeting Tuesday evening.

The main recommendation is that the four towns form an EMS District to pool resources.

The EMS response would then become a combination of paid paramedics and volunteers.

“This report was not meant to get rid of volunteers. It was not meant to promote just paramedics or full-time career. It was meant to be all-encompassing,” said Sechler.

The idea is that paying paramedics would help bring in more people to cover shifts and they could cover more shifts with fewer people.

The firm estimates the towns would need to raise the tax levy by one million dollars collectively to cover the costs.

That’s in addition to the cost of building two new sites to house ambulances.

“You can’t put these two trucks in one spot and expect a good response through the four townships. It’s too big and there’s too much in the way. Putting them kind of opposite of each other, but a quick response to both areas was kind of the thought process,” said Jessie Mabie, the EMS Service Director for Manitowish Waters Fire Company.

Manitowish Waters Town Chairman John Hanson told WXPR he’s working on drafting a resolution for the towns to approve creating an EMS District.

Town approval would be the first step toward this solution.

There will be another community meeting tonight at 6:00 PM at the Presque Isle Community Building.

You can also join via zoom.

Other recommendations from the report include having Nicolet College and local high schools’ team up to offer EMS instruction to high school students. It also recommended using a scheduling system.

Katie Thoresen is WXPR's News Director/Vice President.
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