HCEMS Fully Staffed, Unveils New Ambulance

Officials standing in front of Medic 17 at the HCEMS station at Enterprise South.

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. (WDEF)-Hamilton County EMS unveiled the newest ambulance in its fleet Friday morning.

They say this fleet is a critical piece of equipment at a time when call volume is higher than ever.

Hamilton County EMS has only been operating since 1988 and services all 576 square miles of the county.

With that amount of coverage area, recent staffing shortages have put a strain on the agency.

But, on Friday they announced that they have filled their all of their open positions and added Medic 17.

HCEMS Director John Miller said, “This truck’s only been in service for a few weeks and we’ve already seen our response time trending down…Looking at last year from this year at the same time period from January to October 31st, we’re 1500 calls ahead of where we were this time last year. Last year total we ran 53,707 calls, that’s a calendar year.”

Miller said that this increase in call volume is not due to one particular type of call, but a general variety of emergencies.

He said, “2015, we ran 34,000 calls, so from 2015 to last year we were up to 53,000.”

On average, that over 53 thousand calls in 2022 averages to nearly 150 calls a day, or around six to seven calls an hour.

That translates to one call every 8 to 10 minutes, a number that is only higher this year.

To help combat that, HCEMS has managed to fully staff their department for the first time in over a decade, having hired 23 new employees thanks to a 13 percent pay raise granted by the county.

Hamilton County Mayor Weston Wamp said, “One of the first conversations that John Miller and I had was about the difficulty in hiring, difficulty in staffing, chronically low pay for an incredibly difficult job.”

Miller says with the new ambulance and higher staffing, they can keep more teams in their districts.

He said, “This truck being here will actually help the ambulance in Bakewell stay in its district more often.”

He says current response time has fallen this year from 10 minutes to 9 minutes, and he hopes the agency can soon meet the national standard of 8 minutes.

There are more new ambulances soon on the way, but HCEMS has been waiting for a while on them.

Miller said, “We’ve got 10 on order, four of those have been on order for over three years, so we just got word recently that three of those came off of the assembly line so we’re going to start seeing some of those trickle in.”

Medic 17 will be stationed at the Enterprise South Station but can be in service anywhere across the county.

These 17 ambulances are in addition to each hospital’s fleet.