Fort Worth’s interim fire chief is raising concerns about staffing levels in the fire department’s ambulance service.

At a meeting of the city council’s Public Safety Committee on Tuesday, Interim Chief Raymond Hill said the department is losing EMS staff at an accelerated rate.

About seven EMS staff are leaving the department every month, Hill said, making for an attrition rate of 16%. The average in the fire department historically is 5%, he said. 

The fire department has 360 people on its EMS staff, with a target staffing of 449. Of the 360 on staff, 74 are in training or recently graduated from training and are not yet ready to deploy. That leaves 89 vacant positions. 

Because of the staffing issues, the department is implementing a temporary pilot program to change EMS shifts from 12 hours to 24 hours. 

Currently, EMTs and paramedics work seven 12-hour shifts over two weeks, three shifts one week and four shifts the next. That requires at least four hours of mandatory overtime per person. For three months starting on Saturday, the shifts will change to what’s known as the 24/48 model: 24 hours on duty and 48 hours off duty. 

Hill said the 24/48 schedule helps with work-life balance by giving EMS staff more total days off per month. He said it’s also more popular nationally.

With all the upsides of the 24/48 model, it still has some drawbacks. A big issue the Fort Worth Fire Department is running into is the fact that the model necessitates staff to sleep at fire stations. 

Despite two months of preparation, Hill said the department does not have enough beds in place. They will not have the needed beds for another two months, he said, which would leave just one month left of the pilot program. Staff will need to sleep on cots in the meantime.

The department also must set up partitions for privacy, which is all the more necessary as a higher percentage of EMS staff are women than the firefighters they will be sharing fire stations with. 

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