If anyone wants to see how bad of shape the Aiken County EMS system is, just go watch the last 2 I-Team investigation reports done this past week by WRDW-TV. Really eye opening information.
Pretty good report, but the most important part is what they said at the beginning - that this is typical all across the country. It is. Sounds like Aiken County EMS is just like many other EMS systems across Georgia and the country.
DeKalb County, GA is very regularly "NAT" ("no available transports") with many pending calls. Grady EMS in Atlanta is the same way. In DeKalb, I hear NAT several times a week, and I am obviously not listening all the time, so it must be happening a lot more than that. Kudos to Aiken County, according to the news report, that they regularly call for assistance from neighboring EMS agencies. DeKalb doesn't seem to do that; they just hold the call until they get another DeKalb AMR ambulance available, even if the call might be very close to a neighboring jurisdiction. Even when they are not "NAT" it is often the case that there are so few available ambulances covering the county that response times are north of 30 minutes. In a rural area, that's not unexpected. In an urban area, it's pretty surprising. Sure, some of these calls are relatively low priority. But many are not. I regularly hear heart attacks, shootings, wrecks with life threatening injuries and other critical wait a very long time for an ambulance. I heard a call for a pediatric drowning at a local hotel pool and the dispatcher said they didn't have an ambulance to send (and it didn't sound like they were working to get one from anywhere else; just waiting). This is terrible for patients and family, but it must be really demoralizing for firefighter first responders too.
Dunwoody (in north DeKalb County) was one of the first local jurisdictions here to get particularly noisy about this issue, to no real effect. See
AMR ambulance service facing more questions over response time DeKalb ultimately agreed to station a few ambulances in Dunwoody, which - as far as I can hear - has done basically nothing since those ambulances just get dispatched from Dunwoody to calls in south DeKalb anyway. AMR made a bunch of commitments about response times and the like, but just violates them all the time and there's no meaningful enforcement anyway.
DeKalb politicians downplay this issue by pointing out that fire trucks get there pretty quick and start patient care anyway. True, but there are many medical emergencies for which your chance of survival decreases significantly the longer it takes to get you to definitive care in a hospital setting, regardless of whether an EMT or paramedic is there waiting for a ride with you.