Vermont EMS advisory committee urges statewide assessment, warns of funding and staffing shortfalls

Drew Hazleton, chair of the Vermont EMS Advisory Committee, told the Senate Government Operations Committee on Jan. 23 that Vermont’s emergency medical services face widespread staffing, funding and capacity problems and that the committee has hired a contractor to complete a statewide data assessment.

“We know that EMS in Vermont is in trouble,” Hazleton said, describing a system with widely varying service models, inconsistent data sources and increasing difficulty filling ambulance shifts.

Hazleton said the advisory committee and the health department have secured a contractor to perform a data assessment; the contractor has been given until April 15 to complete the assessment, and the committee expects to deliver a comprehensive statewide EMS plan to the legislature by next December, with work on a five-year plan to follow. The committee is separating the engagement into a data-collection phase followed by a plan-development phase.

The advisory committee is convening information from multiple ongoing efforts, Hazleton said, including the health department’s work and a separate public-safety dispatch review. He said the committee will incorporate dispatch findings rather than duplicate that work, and that the regional governance group created last year has not yet been ready to coordinate but will be contacted in coming months.

Hazleton said a long-standing obstacle is that there is no single, statewide data…