PRESIDENT’S PERSPECTIVE | BRIAN K. RICE

A Fight Worth Having

As firefighters, we stand in a unique crossroads between labor and public safety. Issues that impact our health, safety and effectiveness on the job are often the same issues that affect the health and safety of the public we serve.

Nowhere is this connection more apparent than in the fight to bring down ridiculously long ambulance patient offload times at hospital emergency rooms.

Up and down the state, our firefighter-paramedics have found themselves waiting hours for hospitals to accept critical ER patients. Since they are obligated to provide patient care until the hospital takes over, crews are stuck … in some cases literally … “on the wall.” They can’t leave to answer other calls, creating delays throughout the EMS response system.

For the full story about the wall time crisis and its impact, you can read the cover article in this magazine. As surely as epic wall times have an impact on patient care, they also have a dramatic, sometimes agonizing, effect on our members.

Remember, a firefighter’s “workplace” is the front lines, whether it’s a fire, hazmat, drowning or EMS response. When our members are forced to continue providing patient care in cramped circumstances, it amps up the pressure – physical as well as mental. Medics on scene of a life-threatening emergency, meanwhile, face ever-longer delays in ambulance arrival, forcing them to be administering aid on scene for sometimes upwards of an hour.

It makes an already hard workplace that much harder, leaves taxpayer-funded resources languishing in hospitals, saps morale, and puts patients at risk – those on the wall and those in the field.

This is why CPF is fighting so hard to pass legislation to bring down wall times. It’s an issue that affects our members every day on the job, whether or not they’re paramedics or provide ALS response. In sponsoring AB 40 by Assemblyman Freddie Rodriguez, we are looking to hold hospitals to the same accountability standards that you and your brothers and sisters are held to every day on the job.

Of course, fighting for our members and their communities means taking on some powerful interests. By forcing publicly funded medics to provide care endlessly on the wall, hospitals are, in effect, padding their own bottom lines at taxpayer expense. The California Hospital Association is pulling out all the stops to try to block AB 40. But as of this writing, the Legislature seems to recognize the need for timely, efficient patient transfer, and is siding with Californians. We hope and expect that this important reform will make it into law.

While we’re talking about firefighter issues as public safety issues, I wanted to give a quick shout out to our brothers and sisters of Hemet Firefighters, Local 2342, who were able to shine a national spotlight on child water safety, thanks to the quick action of one of their own.

Hemet Engineer Paramedic Zachary Petite was in his backyard with his family when his one-year-old (being a one-year-old) pulled off his PFD and in a heartbeat, climbed into the swimming pool. In just as quick a heartbeat, Zach – who was within arm’s length and watching the water – pulled his son out of the pool, completely unharmed.

Video of the incident – caught on the security camera focused on the fenced-in pool – went viral and was seen around the world. Critically, Zach and Local 2342 were able to use this footage to send a message about water safety and the importance of staying close and staying present.

We all have responded to drowning calls, trying to push life back into a limp child. They are the hardest calls we can experience. Kudos to our brothers and sisters in Hemet for using their position to make a point and, possibly, save some lives.