The past 13 months have been a busy time for Lebanon’s ambulance squad.
On top of their everyday job of responding to house fires and car crashes, crews have shouldered the added burden of transporting people with COVID-19 to the emergency room.
Lebanon Fire Chief and Emergency Management Director Chris Christopoulos said he has been on the lookout for signs of burnout among his department’s personnel, but so far he hasn’t detected any in his EMTs.
“I feel comfortable that my captains are keeping an eye on it and I haven’t really seen anything that’s even an early indicator of burnout. Although there is a strain on people, they’ve stepped up and risen to the task and done yeoman’s work,” Christopoulos said last week.
Lebanon, like fire and emergency departments elsewhere, keeps a running tally on the number of calls it receives and for what kind of assistance. And the data for 2021 and the month of January 2022 shows a marked jump in ambulance calls and dispatches, which Christopoulos said correlates with the surge in delta and omicron variants of COVID-19.
“We’re still seeing, on a busy week, eight to 10 potential COVID patients per week,” Christopoulos said, which he defined as “pretty much anybody with flu-like symptoms.”
“We’re doing more calls with the same number of people on duty,” he added.
In 2021, Lebanon’s EMS calls excluding vehicle accidents — generally responding to a person’s emergency medical condition — totaled 2,522, up 2.8% from 2,453 in 2020, the first year of the pandemic.
But 2020 actually recorded a sharp drop in non-vehicle EMS calls, falling 10.3% from 2,734 calls in 2019 (2020’s total exceeded 2018’s by 116 calls).
The reason for the fewer calls during the first year of the pandemic in 2020 was not difficult to explain, Christopoulos said.
“We think it’s largely because people didn’t want to go out. They didn’t want to go to the hospital,” he said. “And then in 2021, when people started getting vaccinated and feeling more comfortable about being out in public then we started to see an uptick in our EMS calls.”
The volume of calls has continued to increase into 2022.
In January, Lebanon received 229 non-vehicle injury ambulance calls, up 17.4% from 195 calls in January 2021.
“We have three ambulances on the road a lot more often today than we did a year, year and a half ago,” Christopoulos said. “It’s crazy to see our numbers trending upwards.”
The department has a minimum of five people on ambulance crew duty on weekdays, but Christopoulos said that has not been enough given the volume of calls, so he has had to tap members of the fire division to assist with the workload.
“We’re using them more often to go on an ambulance call because we are just that busy,” he said.
Five members of Lebanon’s EMS workers also had breakthrough cases of COVID-19, which Christopoulos said were due to contact outside of work, but “luckily they’ve been spread out so I haven’t had one full shift out.”
“My big fear is that I lose and entire shift of five to six people and then I have to backfill. That puts a big strain on the organization,” he said.
Although Christopoulos thinks his department has held up pretty well over the past 23 months of the pandemic, especially with the protective protocols it has put in place to prevent staff infections, he doesn’t foresee see ambulance calls easing up.
“We’re all fatigued with COVID. We want it go away,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s going to go away anytime soon. It is what it is.”
Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com.