Nearly a year after The City of Las Cruces and Doña Ana County moved away from their contract with American Medical Response KRWG multimedia reporter Noah Raess spoke with Doña Ana Fire Chief Sean Heck to learn how the transition has gone.
Noah Raess:
Can you kind of tell me about the transition away from AMR in the county?
Sean Heck:
Yeah. So, just a small backstory a little bit so I am from City Fire, that's where I was prior to becoming chief here at the county. And so I've been involved in this whole process for many, many years, mainly from the city side. I was deputy chief of operations over there. And so basically the transition occurred is, the contract that was sent forward, back in 2023 ish they, the parameters that were set forth in that contract, just weren't being metacross the board, to the point it in the like the $3 million that was supposed to be paid to them, they ended up getting almost none of that because the, the benchmarks they were required to hit as far as unit availability, the delays in arriving on scenes, just were never hit. A fter, I think roughly about a year or so of that occurring, the meeting occurred between the City and the County as the two major players that were using AMR at the time. And, you know, as we started talking about these are not hitting their contract and the contract isn't being met. And after, you know, a few discussions and back and forth trying to figure out what was the right course of action, a decision was kind of made that it's just best to terminate the contract and stuff, you know, that it was made and we kind of move forward. At the time, I was involved with City Fire, and like we just had to get ready to go to start covering. We were already transporting in the city and the county had already started transporting too. We were already picking up the slack that was already there. And so ultimately we just had to kind of up it a little bit. Everybody kind of had to increase their numbers of available transport units and so that's kind of what we stand. For City that increased transport units and for the county, we had to increase people because there was a shortfall for the county. It just didn't have the same number of people that city had.
Noah Raess:
That kind of gets into my next question. You know, I was just wondering, are there any growing pains with this? I'm sure it's a big task to take over. So, yeah, what we kind of had to be done to meet the challenge?
Sean Heck:
So, like I said, for the county was people like, and that's probably, I think probably the, arguably the harder one to get because you can get apparatus, but even that could take some time apparently. But getting people and then not just getting people but getting trained people that, you know, people who are good at the job and those things like that takes a little bit more time. So the county had to kind of find another solution. And, the one they picked, this was done before I started, but they went with a company called Elite Medical. They're out of El Paso, but they cover the southwest region, from New Mexico and and to Texas and basically, ask them for some help and staffing two units to help them get some people there. And then, the county themselves also staffed another two units, which for the four units inside, the county which was exactly what AMR was providing at the time. So there really was no, we were trying to match exactly what was contractually supposed to be able to provide it anyway. And so that's that was the benchmark that we used to say, hey, what's the staffing we need? We need four units available, 24/7/365. And so that's what we have. That's what they went forward with right when the contract ended. Today we have increased it a bit more. One of the good parts is we've been able to have actually more units available. We're trying to really bolster our staffing. And now that we've had an opportunity to run a couple academies, increase those staffing numbers, we've been able to sometimes, get a couple more units available. I really can't give you the exact timeframes, when those are always there. And NMSU also was able to start staffing up an ambulance, too, as well, to kind of help meet those needs.
Noah Raess:
You had mentioned this before too. But kind of a big reason for the AMR discussions was, you know, the slow response times. I was just kind of wondering, have those improved, what do those kind of look like now compared to before the transition?
Sean Heck:
I mean, they have immensely improved. I have to be little bit to be, you know, honest with you, I was aware of the numbers for the city response, not so much in the county. The data for the county was really never shared with me, in my time. And that data is not available, and was not shared with me when I transitioned into the chief position. So I can't speak to truly what AMR was providing, what their delays were. I do know on the other side of that, at the city we had an immense improvement because we were averaging sometimes in the area for about 12 to 15 minutes for the ambulance to arrive inside the city. If we're waiting for AMR. So, that's now down to my standard 7 to 11 minute response time. And so critical calls it's actually down to five minutes, 43 seconds. And then for the county, I can tell you today, since January our response time for critical calls, right now we're averaging right around 11 or 12 minutes. But that's the county, which is much larger, and square miles than the city is. Right? It's a lot, it's a much larger area. And so the response times are always going to be longer because of that.
Noah Raess:
You know that once again, that kind of transitions into my next question. You know, the county is so big and there's so many different rural areas. How does the ambulance service, like what challenges come with the ambulance service operating in that area?
Sean Heck:
It's time. Time is the biggest challenge. Time is truly just being able to get from point A to point B. It is truly, probably without a doubt, one of the biggest challenges that I see for the working organization. And that's why we're trying to get more ambulances or every station to be able to stop an ambulance at that station, at least of the man right now, of the 19 stations that are in the county, eight of them are career staffed. So that means they have 24/7/65 coverage. And, so my hope is to try to get an ambulance at every single one of those, which then now gives us the opportunity to have that transport unit more readily available to that region to try to minimize that impact.
