State EMS director warns of workforce, mental‑health and financial strain; highlights field blood program

Jody Radloff, director of the West Virginia Office of Emergency Medical Services, told the Joint Committee on Volunteer Fire Departments and EMS on Jan. 7 that the state’s emergency medical services are under pressure from staffing shortages, financial shortfalls and worsening provider mental health, even as new programs such as field blood transfusions expand across the state.

Radloff said those pressures are measurable: “Over the past three years we’ve ran 1,600,000 transports,” she said, and “we have 800 active paramedics” whose caseloads are concentrated in a relatively small group of agencies. She said 70 percent of transported patients during that period were carried by the state’s 20 largest agencies and that 34 agencies ran fewer than 100 transports per year.

Why it matters: Radloff and lawmakers said those patterns concentrate work and financial risk in a small number of providers, drive burnout among ALS (advanced life support) clinicians and increase the chance that smaller services cannot remain viable — a combination that could reduce emergency coverage in parts of the state.

Radloff described several policy and operational items underway. A field blood program that began with…