Despite pay problems and staff turnover, New Orleans EMS takes each call in stride

NEW ORLEANS – It was mid-morning when Ivy Molloy and Daniel Rokos answered the first call of their shift. The details were sparse. Shots fired. Walmart parking lot on Tchoupitoulas Street. Officer down.

The ambulance sped to the scene as a line of flashing blue lights and sirens grew behind them. As they searched for their patient, Rokos slowly steering the ambulance through the parking lot, a shopper leaving the store yelled at the pair to get out of the way. Finally, they found her, lying on the asphalt on a nearby street, wearing a shredded New Orleans Police Department uniform and crying out in pain.

The emergency responders strapped the woman onto a gurney. Inside the ambulance, Molloy helped lift and pull the gurney in place as Rokos hooked the patient up to health monitors.

As the patient calmed down, she told Molloy what happened. While working in the Walmart parking lot, she had revived someone overdosing in the driver’s seat of his car with Narcan, only for the man to then hit the gas pedal, pulling her along. To try to free herself, she had shot him in the chest. He then crashed into a pickup truck, crushing her between the cars, before driving off again.

Molloy was unfazed, calmly taking blood pressure readings, giving medicine and helping her patient relax.

“Bad things happen to good people all the time. You know that, you see it every single day,” Molloy told her patient, who shuddered with sobs. The paramedic walked the officer through a breathing exercise. Breathe in, hold it for two seconds. Let everything out. Repeat.

“Slowing down your breathing is going help your nauseousness,” Molloy said. “It’s going to help you feel more in control, and that’s half the battle right there: feeling out of control.”

The scene, which took place in May, was emblematic of some of the city’s pressing social issues — policing, the opioid epidemic. For Molloy and Rokos, it was just another day with New Orleans Emergency Medical Services.

Molloy and Rokos are two of the 150 employees working at New Orleans EMS to provide emergency health care and transport to the public. And despite witnessing some of the most traumatic events in the city, they both say it’s a better career than their old office jobs.

Five years ago, Molloy was about to go to school to become a social worker. But during the COVID-19 pandemic, she heard a news story about a national shortage of EMTs and paramedics. So, she changed her plans.

“The first time I got on an ambulance, I just felt like this is where I was supposed to be,” she said.

After more than a decade as an EMT, Rokos has watched cars block his blaring ambulance; he has a scar on his arm from where a patient bit him; passersby have yelled and honked at him as he treated someone in cardiac arrest. Yet he stays because he knows he’s doing important work.

“You don’t often feel the need for an ambulance in your life. Until you have that need … it just doesn’t really occur to you,” Rokos said.

As the city’s EMTs face daily challenges on the job, New Orleans EMS faces an even bigger challenge: holding on to those workers. Molloy and Rokos say it’s demoralizing to watch dozens of colleagues leave the agency, taking years of experience and knowledge with them, to take higher-paying, lower-stress jobs or leave the field altogether.

Slowing turnover remains the agency’s top priority, said Alexis Paquette, EMS’s public information officer. Since 2019, staffing at EMS is down by nearly 14%, and the city has slashed the agency’s personnel budget in recent years as it struggles to fill jobs. Paquette said the turnover has two main causes: staffers don’t make enough money and don’t see EMS as long-term career path.

For years, the agency has said it needs room in its budget to pay paramedics and EMTs competitively. Although EMS staff have received incremental citywide raises under LaToya Cantrell’s administration, the agency hasn’t been allocated department-specific money for such pay raises. Currently, a paramedic like Molloy earns about $27 per hour, while an EMT like Rokos earns about $20.

“The people that answer the phone when you call 911 make more money than I do,” said Rokos, who has more than a decade of experience as an EMT.

Molloy says she can afford to live on what she makes because of her lifestyle choices.

“I tell people I make a living wage because I’m an independent person who drives a 20-year-old truck, and I have no interest in being married, having children or owning a home,” she said.

New Orleans EMS faces a high call volume, currently receiving a new call every 10 minutes on average. For the last two years, the department received more than 70,000 calls, according to data shared by New Orleans EMS. The department’s pay and budget don’t match the workload, Paquette said, exacerbating the problem. It also affects how quickly New Orleans residents receive help. In recent years, the agency has also faced criticism over lengthy wait times.

Paquette said staffers often leave to work for private emergency service providers, companies that can pay more and offer more downtime. Others are working EMS jobs while studying nursing or medicine. Pay bumps could help staying at the agency feel more sustainable, she said.

“ A lot of our staff are young people who don’t have families or don’t have much responsibility outside of working here,” Paquette said. Though the origins of emergency medical services have been traced back to Napoleon’s time, the EMS system as we know it only evolved after federal reforms in the 1970s, making it a relatively young health care profession.

The low pay can help amplify a perception in the health care industry that EMS is a temporary job, not a career, Molloy and Rokos noted.

“The more expensive things get, the harder it becomes,” Molloy said. “We’re hemorrhaging people left and right.”

As summer heats up, Molloy and Rokos expect to stay busy, responding to more injuries related to doing outdoor activities, stormy weather and extreme heat. Meanwhile, the agency will be preparing yet another ask to the Mayor’s Office and the City Council for higher wages.

Paquette said she hoped to see residents show up to the city budget meetings that typically occur in August and September to help bolster support for raises. This year, the City Council approved fee increases to help EMS bring in more revenue, but it’s unclear how that might translate to pay raises. One legislative effort to put state money toward paying EMS workers has failed three times, most recently during this session. Had it passed, local EMS workers would have received $600 a month each in extra pay.

Back in the ambulance, Rokos drove as Malloy attended to their patient.

“I just want to know if they got him,” the officer said, crying again. “I just can’t believe he did that.”

Molloy reassured her, promising to find the answer when they reached University Medical Center. Within 10 minutes, the ambulance arrived. The officer, surrounded by a team of trauma doctors, was whisked away in the gurney with Molloy at her side. Not far behind, doctors swarmed around another gurney. This one carried the man shot by the officer, an automated CPR machine pounding on his chest. NOPD later said the driver died at the hospital, while the officer, who was working an off-duty security shift at the time, was in stable condition.

As Molloy handled the patient paperwork with the hospital, Rokos quietly started setting up for the next call. In the downtime, he helped clean out blood from the other ambulance on the scene.

“This is pretty run of the mill,” Molloy said, dropping down on a seat in the back of their ambulance after the patient transfer followed by Rokos.

“We’ve seen that and worse, 100 times over,” Rokos added.

Then, it was onto the next call: this time, an elderly man with chest pain who had taken a fall. After pulling up to a small home on the West Bank, the pair jumped out and grabbed the gurney — ready to do it all over again.

This article first appeared on Verite News New Orleans and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.