The following is from a letter sent to the Board of Selectmen regarding the Harvard Ambulance Service:
I have a fair amount of experience with emergency services within the hospital setting as well as emergency services that served the community of the third largest city in Massachusetts. I have read the July 15 minutes published on the town’s website. There are quite a few discrepancies between the news reporting and the letters to the editor and the actual data from the minutes.
Unfortunately some volunteer EMTs have made an inappropriate judgment that billing for a service somehow diminishes their volunteer service. Whether right or wrong, that is what they think. There are several things they do today that are not in the best interest of our emergency services. Nine calls not responded to is not appropriate; deciding whether to pick up an emergency call from home is not good practice either. I also believe that they will be almost impossible to change without a great disruption to the service.
However, I do believe that with a change in the management of the service from the town’s perspective, you can improve the service as well as develop a positive relationship with the squad. We need an ambulance service in this town. If we do not have a certified ambulance service of our own, we will have to purchase an outside service. I would like to suggest the following for your consideration as a mechanism for change.
The Board of Selectmen is responsible, and should be, for the ambulance service. I think that you should pay the director a salary as you do the chief of the Fire Department, also a volunteer organization. We need a mission statement for the squad, objectives, rules for behavior, definition of terms, etc. It is a business; we need to handle it professionally. I also believe that we should pay the certified EMTs a stipend like we do the volunteer firemen.
I believe that we should be billing all insurances, including Medicare, for the emergency runs.
Dorothy W. Klotz
Partridge Hill Road
