Copyright 2006 Newsday, Inc.
By WILLIAM MURPHY
Newsday (New York
Nassau County’s ambulance service has antiquated procedures, according to an audit released yesterday.
“Incredibly, we found that the police ambulance bureau does not maintain statistics on response time,” Nassau County Comptroller Howard Weitzman said in releasing the audit.
The audit of the ambulance service of the Nassau County Police Department found that employee time sheets are handwritten and office workers in the ambulance bureau do not sign in or out when a supervisor is not around.
For a typical day, five of the eight employees signed out by the administrative supervisor worked a later shift than the supervisor. Therefore, the supervisor attested to the employees’ attendance without direct knowledge, according to the audit.
In a response included in the audit, the police department said it plans to implement procedures to measure response times and develop a new employee time sheet system.
It also said it would try to collect more revenue from patients. The audit found the agency collected $13.6 million of the $20.5 million it billed for ambulance services in 2004.
Lt. Kevin Smith, a police spokesman, said yesterday the department considers its ambulance service “one of the finest in the country.”
He said paper records show an average response time of six minutes for the month of January. In addition, he said, the first patrol car usually arrives at the scene within two minutes and the police officer can provide basic emergency medical care.
County police ambulances, which operate around the clock, responded to 55,859 calls last year, up from 43,007 in 1996, and with an aging population the need for ambulance service will continue to grow, Weitzman said.
Volunteer fire companies, working part-time, handled 33,282 ambulance calls that were referred by the county, which does not keep track of emergency calls that go directly to the volunteers, he said. Weitzman said the county should not be asking volunteer firefighters to make eight to 10 ambulance runs a day.
Alan Cooper, a fire commissioner in Garden City Park, said his 100-member department has more than doubled the number of ambulance runs in the past 10 years, to about 400 or 450 last year. “It’s definitely a drain on our people. It’s on top of 500 fire runs we made last year,” Cooper said.
Suffolk County passed legislation last year mandating all emergency service agencies to compile dispatch times, travel time, length of stay at the emergency and hospital arrival time.
“The position the county [Nassau] finds itself in now is that we are going to be called on to meet an ever-increasing demand for ambulance services and we really don’t understand how our own department operates,” the comptroller said.
Staff writer Elizabeth Moore contributed to this story.
CALLS FOR HELP
Nassau county police ambulances responded to
55,859 calls in 2005
43,007 calls in 1996