Lee County looking to hire 21 EMS workers

Lee County commissioners will discuss recruiting 21 people to help ease the increasing workload on the county’s exhausted emergency medical service workers. The county says the addition of 21 employees will allow the increased opportunity for time off without impacting the operational readiness of EMS.

According to the county, EMS workload has increased dramatically in the last 90 days, with unique incidents in August 2021 up 31% over August 2019 alone.

The hiring project is a collaboration between the Lee County’s departments of public safety, economic development and human resources and Hodges University.

They’re trying to incentivize people to sign up to become EMTs whether or not they are already certified; there is a rapid seven-week training program and a new apprenticeship program for the purpose of readying new recruits to take on the job.

LINK: Click here for more information on applying to become a Lee County EMT.

“One of the things you think about as a commissioner and being a representative of the people, you know, you want to think about things like public safety and making sure that they can get an ambulance when they call one in a timely fashion,” said Brian Hamman, Lee County commissioner. “And right now we know that we are growing so fast, and we need to be planning for the future. We don’t want to just get there and react when it happens.”

Adding just one more person to the EMS staff could make a huge difference, let alone 21 new people. According to the agenda for the Tuesday night’s Lee County commission meeting, the COVID-19 pandemic is what has resulted in impacts on EMS staffing and workload; quarantine, isolation orders and fatigue from 18 months of intense work.

“There’s a big need to actually hire more folks to work on the ambulances, because of a couple factors; really, we have a lot of folks [who] really worked very hard over the last two years to serve our community through the pandemic,” Hamman said. “And we need to help them get caught up on some time to recuperate and get their energy back. And, honestly, we need to also make sure that we’re dealing with the growth that’s happening. We’ve had a lot of people move down here since the pandemic started now, and we need to make sure that we have all the personnel we need to serve them.”

The administrative staff would handle the hiring, not the commissioners, who say the funding for this hiring program would come from the American Rescue Plan.