The COVID-19 pandemic took a big toll on volunteer emergency medical services (EMS) crews across the country. With shortages continuing, response times can tick up, especially in rural communities.

Now, some counties are shelling out themselves to help fill the gaps, including in Niagara County.

Michael Carroll works for Niagara County EMS as the paramedic supervisor.

“If the primary ambulance response can't get out for whatever reason or is unavailable, then we are automatically dispatched to those calls,” he explained.

Started in November 2023, the agency runs two crews during the day, seven days a week.

“We run anywhere from three, four calls, to nine or 10 calls a day,” Carroll said.

It's a backup for diminishing volunteer numbers, especially during business hours.

“We all kind of expected that we were going to be busy, but we're definitely busier than I think we originally thought we [would be],” he added.

It was an issue the county started working on a few years ago.

“Oftentimes you might see one, two, three, four, even sometimes five agencies try and find providers to provide that service to the community, to get an ambulance out, to get someone treated into the hospital,” explained Niagara County fire coordinator and director of emergency services Jonathan Schultz.

With more than $1 million in seed money from Niagara County, they got the new ambulances, equipment and paid personnel needed to get this off the ground.

“We're centrally located in the county," said Tom Eggert, Niagara County EMS operations manager. "We can get in any direction within 20 minutes."

With shortages continuing across New York state, this could be a solution for many.

“Response time county-wide has definitely gotten better,” Schultz said. “Every couple of months there's more municipalities getting in looking into the opportunity to actually create their own county-run ambulance. The model has been created here. It can be dropped in any county across the state.”

The one thing they stress is that this is not a replacement.

“We want this to stay a supplemental system," added Eggert. "We hope five years from now that all the 19 volunteer transporting ambulances are still in service. We're here to support them.”

Volunteers continue to be a resource that saves the state millions of dollars every year, and so while this works, it’s not the end all be all.

“The bigger issue is we need more providers in New York state," Eggert said. "We need more recruitment tools, we need more education, more paramedic programs [and] more EMT programs to kind of entice the younger generations. This is this is a step in the right direction."

For Carroll, whether he’s on shift at the county or elsewhere as a volunteer, this system does relieve some of the stress and anxiety that first responders feel.

“The data is always shown that the calls for ambulances have always increased," he said. "It does provide that failsafe for the community, for the volunteers and it just helps all around.”

Niagara County EMS is mostly focused on those daytime hours, where volunteer crews face the most issues.

In the future, they do hope to expand that service to 24 hours, though.