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Date: 5/11/2022
HUNTINGTON – The Hilltown Community Ambulance Association (HCAA), which is based in Huntington and serves the towns of Blandford, Chester, Huntington, Montgomery, Russell and Worthington, has a new director.
Bailey Jones, a paramedic who has been with HCAA for over a year, was selected by a committee of the board of directors and staff from two internal candidates.
Outgoing HCAA Director Angela Mulkerin, who has led the nonprofit agency since 2016, is training Jones, who she said is currently taking on more responsibility at the ambulance service. The two will serve as co-directors until Mulkerin retires, at a date to be determined.
“I will stay in a consultation capacity for as long as they need me,” Mulkerin said.
Jones, of Belchertown, began his career in emergency services as a chair van driver for Alert Ambulance in 2015 after graduating high school. He then attended the Elite Medic Training Academy in Springfield, graduating as an emergency medical technician, and was hired by the National Ambulance Company.
“This is when I realized I wanted to make EMS a career,” Jones said. He went to Greenfield Community College to become a paramedic, and received his certification in 2019. He then worked for the Northampton Fire Department and as a COVID-19 tester for Cooley Dickinson Hospital, before coming to HCAA.
“I found the perfect fit in the Hilltowns,” he said, where he appreciates the family atmosphere and the sense of community. “It drives me to give 100 percent each and every day.”
Summing up the last two years under COVID-19, Mulkerin praised her staff.
“We did great. The employees who worked here did great on the road. No one got sick, and no one was quarantined. They stayed safe, sacrificed and stayed away from their families,” she said.
Not until the third week of April 2022 did two employees test positive and have to quarantine.
Mulkerin said HCAA has continued to struggle with full staffing. She said the agency employs many college students, who work part-time while they study at Westfield State University or Smith College. They currently have one student studying at Bridgewater State University.
The students generally want to go into medicine, often to become a physician assistant, and need to work a certain number of hours serving patients, which they get on an ambulance.
“It used to be that everyone who came here wanted to be a firefighter or paramedic someday. Now we have only one who is interested in emergency services,” Mulkerin said.
Formerly, EMTs and paramedics mostly worked on ambulances, but during the pandemic, the state has been hiring paramedics to staff vaccine clinics and work at testing sites, offering them double the wages HCAA could offer.
“We had a shallow candidate pool, and we don’t have the money to be competitive,” Mulkerin said.
HCAA increased its hourly rate in order to attract more candidates, with basic EMTs increasing from $15 per hour during the day, and $16 at night and weekends, to a flat rate of $18 per hour. Paramedics increased from $18 and $19 per hour to a flat rate of $25 per hour.
“At those rates, we can attract more candidates and have hired five more, but we can’t regularly use overtime. During training, we had to put the truck out of service some of the time,” Mulkerin said.
“We have made a concerted effort to only shut it down when we have no staffing,” Jones said, adding, “It’s easier in the summer, because college kids want to work as much as possible.”
Mulkerin said the short-term problem is solved with the hiring of college students and new paramedics, but it’s been solved “with a band-aid.”
“We’ve been on a shoestring budget forever. From the start, we’ve been underfunded. It would be great if all the towns could give us more money,” she said, though she added that the towns don’t have the money either. Mulkerin said she believes the long-term solution is state or federal funding.