Ambulance Service Is Launched in Ventura

They were ready a minute past midnight, but Ventura Fire Department paramedics Paul Willett and Thomas Hoffman had to wait nine hours before they were called out Monday morning.

The call was for a man having a seizure at his home on Thompson Boulevard, but they said the man apparently has seizures often and he didn’t need to go to the hospital.

But it was a historic call nonetheless, as the city of Ventura broke from the rest of the county and started offering ambulance service for the first time.

After 20 years of talk, three years of intense lobbying and a recent court battle, the city decided to invest about $150,000 in three new ambulances and hire 12 paramedics to start the service.

In June, the city won a court case against the county’s largest ambulance service, MedTrans Inc., allowing the city to move forward.

A subsidiary of MedTrans--Pruner Health Services--had the contract to operate ambulance service in the city. MedTrans sued in early June arguing that the takeover would irreparably harm its business.

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Attorneys for the company said that if the Fire Department took over service, it would cause confusion and delays. But department officials said they will be able to provide better service at a lower cost.

“When we got into this we scrutinized it ourselves,” Fire Chief Dennis Downs said. “Now that we’re in it, I anticipate we’ll be scrutinized, and I fully expect we’ll deliver. The level of service will be even better.”

Michael Harris, who manages the department’s Emergency Medical Service, said the transition has gone smoothly so far.

The Fire Department has ambulances at three stations with two paramedics assigned to each of those rigs. In two other stations without ambulances, the department has firefighters trained as paramedics assigned to fire engines, allowing the department to have 40% more coverage than the private ambulance service, Harris said.

The paramedics working on the ambulances are all civilians. The hope is that eventually all the paramedics will be trained as firefighters, Harris said, but that depends on funding.

Paramedic Paul Willett, 32, who works out of Fire Station No. 1, applied for his job gambling that he would eventually be able to become a firefighter-paramedic.

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Like most of the other paramedics, Willett has worked for several years as a paramedic with a private ambulance service. Although the job with the department does not pay more, the opportunity to eventually be hired as a firefighter-paramedic--with its good pay and benefits--was too much to pass up, he said.

Willett’s boss, Capt. Myles Smith, who was on the committee that hired all the department’s paramedics, said that the desire to be both a firefighter and paramedic was one of the qualities he was looking for in applicants.

“The first question we asked them is why they wanted to become a paramedic with us,” Smith said. “We looked very favorable at that.”

Mike Elliot, 27, a paramedic assigned to an ambulance at Fire Station No. 3, worked for several years with MedTrans before applying for the three-year paramedic position with the Fire Department.

“It’s a risk,” Elliot said. “But if all this works out, it will be worth it.”