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Published June 21 in the Louisville Courier-Journal Editorial: First aid for EMS Louisville Courier-Journal Editorial They may be aberrations, but the breakdowns in judgment and performance by Louisville EMS workers over the past few years as still shocking. Taxpayers deserve more than the stock excuses and boilerplate assurances coming from City Hall. Aldermanic President Steve Magre has suggested the right course. The city should contract for an independent management audit of the agency. It is simply not plausible to pretend, as City Hall is trying to do, that issues such as turnover and pay lie behind last month's fiasco, when an ambulance ran out of gas while rushing a dying child to the hospital. Crews on three consecutive shifts had failed to perform the most elementary tasks assigned them: make sure the tank is full when your shift starts and fill it when your shift ends. It doesn't take highly paid workers or ones with years of experience to do that. Just well-managed ones. Nor is it plausible to pretend that this negligence was the result of problems left over from the Abramson administration. Certainly, something wasn't going right back then, either. City taxpayers have paid $825,000 to settle two wrongful-death suits stemming from EMS crews' refusal to take patients to the hospital in 1998, and another suit is pending from the same year. But the Armstrong administration has been in office for 18 months, and Fire Chief Greg Frederick for nearly a year. If the agency's problems can resist solutions for that long -- if the new contract and the higher pay and the new chief still can't get the gas tank filled and lax workers disciplined -- then, clearly, the administration needs some expert management advice. Let's get it, and eliminate any risk that an EMS that was once a model for the nation could become a bad local joke.
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