(Aug. 15, 2014) -- When I hear our fire chief comment about the success of his new paramedic system, one that I like to refer to as the Monomedic Program, it's very different than what I'm told is actually taking place.

Chief DuRee has blamed increased response times and/or a lack of available units at certain incidents on reduced staffing levels for his department. He says his new Monomedic Program has nothing to do with this. He then returns to his mantra that response times are getting better, not worse, claiming this is proof positive that his new system is better than what the remaining 99% of Los Angeles County Fire Departments utilize. Amazing!! To my knowledge, the fire chief hasn't publicly spoken a word critical of the City Council's budget actions that left his department with reduced staffing for taxpayers.

What Chief DuRee rarely mentions is that when only one paramedic arrives on a single unit, he or she is hampered insofar as what that paramedic can and can't do right away because serious responses involving the most serious medical actions require at least two paramedics. Chief DuRee told the Council on Aug. 12 that one paramedic can do many of the things two can do and acknowledged some things a single paramedic can't do. That's obviously fewer things than the public previously received when two paramedics arrived together and could do everything paramedics can do. Certainly one paramedic plus an ambulance driver in no way equates to better service for the public than what Long Beach had prior to this badly devised experiment.

Next what the Chief doesn't tell you is that under his system, when one paramedic arrives in an ambulance and a second paramedic arrives separately aboard a firefighting apparatus, if the injured or sick person must be transported to the hospital, the firefighting apparatus loses two of its four personnel as they must go with the ambulance paramedic squad to the hospital. The ambulance driver drives them and two paramedics remain in the back of the squad all the way to the hospital with the firefighting engine or truck following. This can tie up the firefighting apparatus for fifteen minutes to an hour at the hospital waiting to be released by hospital staff as they can NOT leave until that time. This referred to as "holding the wall" by our firefighters. (Chief DuRee tried to downplay this issue at the Aug. 12 City Council meeting, attributing it an overabundance of caution by arriving personnel in launching the new system. What does that mean? They're less cautious now?)

What the chief doesn't want any of you to know is that the firefighting apparatus carrying the second paramedic is TAKEN OUT OF SERVICE AND NOT AVAILABLE FOR CALLS, while the original call is still being handled! Even if the original response time was a minute or so quicker under the new system, how in the world can one defend a system that just cost residents the availability of a firefighting apparatus? Unless one's thought process is a bit twisted, one can't defend this or convince the public that this is an improvement in delivering fire service to the public.

And here are some more interesting matters that the Fire Chief hasn't addressed publicly. I'm told that the civilian equivalent of the second paramedic (the ambulance driver or EMT) receives no special training in "code three" driving (responses with lights and siren.) Driving the paramedic squad and a patient to a hospital is a code three, lights and siren response. What do you think the city's (i.e. taxpayers') liability will be if an ambulance driver without that training is involved in a lights and siren crash while heading to a hospital with a paramedic crew and their patient?

My next comments are directed at Chief DuRee's statements about how long the department has planned and trained for this new Monomedic program. I'm told by members of the fire department in various ranks that the total amount of time spent in training for this new system was less than a day. If that's true, then I'd say that as a practical matter, there was no serious training for the rollout of this new paramedic program. What I've heard from those who'd know is there was zero or near-zero communication with the Los Angeles County Fire Dept. or Orange County Fire Authority which border our city. We have mutual aid agreements with them, and vice versa, in which both parties may be asked to provide assistance to the other when there's a shortage. I'm aware of what Chief DuRee told the Council on Aug. 12 [and LBREPORT;com reported] about automatic mutual aid requests being down, but I've been told by firefighter personnel that our requests for aid from other agencies are up and that other agencies' requests for mutual aid from the LBFD are down due to the fact that we are so short on pieces of apparatus.

I live in the 5th Council District. This is the largest district in the city, geographically speaking, and the fire apparatus are already spread way too thin out East. This program has exacerbated the situation and it is only going to get worse as the calls for service in other parts of the city far outweigh those in the Fifth. Fire service response times are critical and when apparatus has further to travel to get from where they are to where they need to be, people die, and structures are lost, and it is just that simple!

My last comments in this article (and there will be more) have to do with the burn-out that I believe this new program will create among our paramedics. A paramedic's job is hectic and very stressful. With only one paramedic on the squad, the stress and pressure they face won't go down; it will undoubtedly go up. Furthermore waiting around for a second paramedic to arrive just adds to this stress. Ask yourself: What good does it do to have a slightly quicker response time (and I'm not convinced the response times are actually quicker for the first responder since the Chief hasn't shared written data with the public yet to my knowledge) when the first arriving paramedic can't do everything that could be done until the second paramedic arrives to adequately handle the most serious emergencies? I will just call this the "half a loaf" plan because half a loaf arriving quicker isn't better than the system we had before the City Council made Long Beach residents test subjects in this.

Hopefully the new City Council, a majority of whom were elected after this budget-driven plan was adopted by a majority of their predecessors and took office just days after it was implemented, will look at this with a realistic and critical eye and kill this program before lives and property are lost and before our sworn personnel are totally burnt out!

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