Pros
Good pay rate for EMT's, but you have to sell your soul for it. Always have overtime available.
Cons
Where do I start? All ambulances receive the bare minimum maintenance to keep them on the road. Many of the trucks are severely unsafe to drive. Many of the ambulances do not have air conditioning. The majority of Dispatchers and Supervisors are extremely rude with zero sympathy for the well-being of the crews. You are just a truck number with two slabs of meat onboard that happen to have EMS training. They will run you into the ground, and then stack more calls on top of that. Going along with the previous point, they are severely understaffed. They do not have enough personnel for the amount of contracts they have. They will have you anywhere from Philadelphia to Springfield to Bucks County. Dispatch will run you well beyond your end time. Get off at 1900? Be ready for that long distance transport that will take an hour and a half to do at 1830. They only schedule two weeks at a time which makes it very hard to plan things in your personal life. However, it is a consistent schedule so I will give them that. They will blatantly deny your time-off requests because they can. Even if you submit it well before the planned day off. The company executives are not on the same page. One side will encourage you to take a lot of ConEd classes, and the other side will deny the days off for you to take the class. Will get upset with you for calling out on a certain day every week, even though you told them when you were hired that you can't work that certain day. Dispatch will harass you to go in and make patient contact well before the pickup time. This frustrates both the nurses and the patient who thought they had an hour to get everything together; to now feeling rushed because they think we are waiting on them. Dispatch will then harass you asking you what your status is, even when they know the patient is not ready, paperwork is not ready, etc. Patients are just customers to them, which is why they try to rush you as much as possible so they can make the most money. They will often ask you to try and pressure the nurses into speeding things up so we can leave with the patients faster. I can tell you that both nurses and patients do NOT appreciate this and will not end well for the company as it leaves a bad taste in their mouth. Once signed up for the scheduling website they make you use, all messages will be automatically forwarded to your phone and email. Be prepared to get constant messages about shifts they need filled. They like to send them three at a time, and about 5 times a day. The Port Richmond location keeps it's ambulances inside. You may think, "Oh good, they are keeping them out of the elements!" which technically they are, but the warehouse is infested with pigeons and there is fecal matter everywhere; along with that the occasional dead and decaying pigeon. Which, I happened to see not even two feet from a car seat that is meant to transport infants. Would you want your child sitting in that? Dispatch often forgets or fails to verify important information, such as... What equipment is needed, addresses (confusing the billing address with the address the patient is being discharged too), and getting the room number of the patient incorrect. So not only have I almost taken patients to the wrong address, I have almost taken the wrong patient. Luckily, I verify my patient’s information, but it shouldn’t be up to me to do the dispatcher’s job correctly. Coworkers are hit and miss. Some love their job, some are burnt out and overworked, and others are just there for a paycheck and could not care less about anything. If you work on a "dedicated" unit, and I use that term lightly, be prepared to be sitting in the ambulance all day because they do not have anywhere else for you to relax between calls. That is, if they aren’t slamming you with calls.
