Conn. Town in Angry Dispute Over Ambulance Service

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(TNS) – After what they call deteriorating service, Wethersfield officials are looking to oust a longtime local ambulance service and replace it with a private contractor.

The move has set off a bitter dispute in town, with advocates of the local Wethersfield Emergency Management Services Association WEMSA angrily insisting that its performance is better, more efficient and often faster than the commercial Aetna Ambulance.

But Town Manager Frederick Presley argued very differently in his request for the state public health department to replace WEMSA with Aetna as Wethersfield’s primary ambulance service provider.

“WEMSA has created an untenable situation in Wethersfield that is jeopardizing the health, safety and welfare of Wethersfield’s people,” Pressley wrote in January letter asking Public Health Commissioner Manisha Juthani to immediately suspend WEMSA as the town’s primary provider.

The dispute appears to have been brewing through the second half of 2023, and erupted into bitter social media debates this month as well as a series of sharp exchanges at a town council meeting Monday.

Pressley and WEMSA advocates accused each other of poor communication as well as misrepresenting or distorting facts, and each one raised a warning of potentially dire outcomes.

“I cannot say how scared I am for someone to have a medical emergency and by the time Aetna arrives they will be cold,” said James Clark of Hillsdale Avenue. “If it takes them 20 minutes to get to the South End of Hartford, it will take another 10 to get to Wethersfield.”

“The relationship we had (with WEMSA) was working very well but you take away Aetna from the equation and this town loses and it loses big,” Pressley told the council. “I met with multiple people on fire and police in this town that are responding to the accidents and they said ‘you cannot let Aetna leave, we’d be in so much trouble.’”

WEMSA for decades operated as an all-volunteer organization with state certification to handle all medical emergencies in town. It dealt with routine calls on nights and weekends and provided basic service at the most critical emergencies, but relied on a paid contactor to handle all of that work on weekdays. The contractor, currently Aetna, also handled the most severe emergencies that required more highly trained staff.

The all-volunteer model in Wethersfield eventually became unsustainable, and a few years ago members converted it to a nonprofit association with some paid staff. WEMSA sought to expand its fleet and pushed to take some weekday responsibility from Aetna , and the town tried unsuccessfully to broker a new contract designating when each service would handle 911 calls.

“The EMS system in our town has worked well for 68 years and only now that we are covering the Town 24/7/365, taking some calls away from Aetna, does Aetna have an issue with the arrangement,” according to WEMSA.

“WEMSA is a local, nonprofit group. Aetna/Hartford Healthcare is a commercial, for-profit corporation trying to stifle competition and give patients less choice,” WEMSA said. “This is a dangerous precedent and should be concerning to all of our citizens.”

But Pressley contends that Aetna was in the right.

“Aetna tried to arrange a meeting with WEMSA to no avail. EMS response in Wethersfield became inefficient and dangerous,” he wrote. “WEMSA failed to communicate with Aetna regarding its scheduling (if it had an ambulance available or not), and Aetna was concerned about operational decisions made by WEMSA crew members.”

WEMSA announced at the end of last year that it had replaced Aetna with the East Windsor Ambulance Association to provide backup coverage as well as the advanced-care staff that Aetna had given. Pressley said WEMSA gave him no data on East Windsor’s operations or response times, so he asked Aetna to stay on and then wrote to the state for help.

The public health department will conduct a hearing April 19; hearing officers will issue a recommendation to Juthani about whether WEMSA should be allowed to stay on.

Resident Kelly-Ann Clark of Hillsdale Avenue, a former assistant chief when WEMSA was an all-volunteer operation, warned the council that costs to residents will rise if WEMSA is pushed out.

“If you call them with a stomachache and need to go to the hospital, Aetna is going to charge $1,300, the volunteers charge $800,” she said. “If Aetna takes over, you’re charging our townspeople more money. I think that’s a travesty.”

But Pressley said that WEMSA’s abrupt attempt to switch to East Windsor’s service wasn’t acceptable.

“I’m not comfortable with this agreement and I’ve seen nothing from WEMSA to show that I should be,” he told WEMSA supporters at the council meeting. “Aetna’s been here for 20 years, they’ve responded to the majority of the calls. We’ll let the state decide what’s right. I’m sorry it’s come to this point, but we didn’t initiate this change. It was your organization that initiated it.”