Pros
Experience. Due to the number of calls you will run you will get a lot of experience. As another reviewer mentioned this is definitely a good place to get experience dealing with corrupt, antagonistic and incompetent management. You also get lots of experience being verbally abused and degraded by the Los Angeles County Fire Department! Overtime is available. There is a union and it has recently become stronger and more effective. It provides some protection from management. Flexible schedule if you can handle working several days straight with no sleep. Generally good field level employees that really help each other out.
Kontras
Almost Everything. Pay is minimum wage for 24hr shifts and a little more for shifts 12hrs or less. Benefits are expensive and premiums are high. Horrible management. There is currently only one member of the management team with any integrity and he is largely ostracized by the rest of the management team who trash talk him behind his back to his subordinates every chance they get. Most stations are extremely busy and there is no concern whatsoever for crew safety. You could run 911 calls all day and then at night get sent on a LDT (long distance transport) normally these are 60-100 miles but sometimes more. When you down enough caffeine to get you there and back you come back to your station and immediately get more 911 calls. Crews regularly fall asleep while driving due to extreme exhaustion. As long as there is no damage when they hit a curb or go off the shoulder these are not reported. If you report them you get written up and possibly a suspension. You also won't be able to pick up more shifts which most need to do in order to pay the bills. Injuries are extremely common and management often harasses those who go out on injury. Much of the work force is composed of those trying to get into the fire department. Since only a small percentage make it on the rest are often stuck working in private ambulance companies while trying to pay off school loans. The result is a lot of people in some sort of financial hardship and management loves to hold your job over your head constantly threatening loss of employment for anything from involvement with the union to refusing to do special favors for management. Those who are applying with the fire departments need to keep a clean record and management takes full advantage of this knowing that these individuals will do ANYTHING to avoid ruining their career. Use your imagination... It's happened. Along with this AMR will do anything to please the contracted hospitals and LA Co Fire. If a firefighter or nurse is having a bad day AMR will side with them almost every time to protect their contracts. This has given them free reign to verbally abused and degrade crews. Expect to hold the wall a lot! Hospitals are busy and Palmdale Regional has lazy charge/triage nurses. I have seen crews sit holding the wall for more than four hours only to be told to put their patient in the waiting room. (This happened without any testing or evaluation being done during those four hours.) I have seen patients in excruciating pain with broken bones left without hospital care on an ambulance gurney for fifteen hours. Meanwhile the charge nurse was posting on Facebook and playing on her phone. Most Fire Department medics only want to be firefighters and have no interest in providing good patient care. They're goal is to send every person who calls 911 to the hospital by ambulance but without a fire department medic going with them. They think this protects them from liability and prevents "rekindles". The result is they have trained many in the community to abuse the 911 system. They often threaten alert and oriented adults to go to the hospital and sometimes just kidnap people who are adamatly refusing to go. These are not rare occurrences. Expect to see at least one every couple of shifts. The fire medics also regularly lie to base hospitals to ship patients BLS. You get left trying to care for an ALS patient with BLS scope and equipment. Also you are often sent to the wrong facility because you are sent to the MAR (closest hospital) instead of the correct specialty hospital. (If there is a reason to go to a specialty hospital generally fire medics have to follow up.) If you choose to upgrade and divert to the correct facility you have to recontact the fire department and if you are far enough away from the hospital re-respond fire medics. This is a good way to get the fire department furious at you. Expect to face disciplinary actions due to multiple made up complaints. The doctor at the ER will thank you but there will be hell to pay.
