The shortage of emergency medical services staff, an ongoing issue worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic, left many Austin residential areas with limited coverage on Sept. 10 while ambulances were diverted to the UT area for Texas’ football game against Alabama. 

“The department is very analytical in their decision to elect not to staff certain ambulances,” said Capt. Darren Noak, public information officer for Travis County. 

Noak said emergency service providers are relocated based on their area’s historical and anticipated caller volumes. He said occasionally, areas will have overlapping ambulance coverage. 

Selena Xie, president of the Austin EMS Association, said since starting in the healthcare industry 10 years ago, there has been a roughly 10% staffing shortage in EMS services consistently in the city. Since the pandemic started, she said those rates have climbed to about 25%. As of Sept. 14, EMS was short 78 clinical specialists and 46 paramedics, Noak said. 

Xie said consistent shortages are partly attributed to a lack of employee benefits, as well as the profession’s high-demand lifestyle. 

“We definitely have people who have left because they are immunocompromised, because they have family members that are, because the workload was really high, because we were being asked to come in too many times on overtime,” Xie said.

Noak said in response to these shortages, EMS no longer mandates overtime, and Xie said entry-level EMT pay has increased to $22 per hour. Ambulances may be staffed on a voluntary basis or left empty, Noak said. 

Xie said Austin EMS is hoping to raise starting pay to $27 per hour to stay competitive with the pay rates of other agencies. 

Comparatively, other city emergency services have similar pay rates that officials say can make retaining first responders difficult.  Bob Nicks, president of the Austin Firefighters Association, said entry-level firefighters start at $19 per hour but work a 52-hour minimum work week compared to an EMS first responder’s 40 hours. 

Nicks said the fire department is also experiencing some staffing shortages, causing the department to require employees to work overtime. Because the city requires all firefighter units to be staffed for any emergency, the fire department has kept its mandatory overtime policy in place, Nicks said. 

“The city will order us to come to work on certain days,” Nicks said. “We’re happy to do that to make sure we don’t lower service delivery to the citizens, but it is becoming quite stressful for the firefighters.”