It looks like Pandora has been playing her pranks in Massachusetts lately, pulling back the lid to her EMT certification box. The johnny-on-the-spot bureaucrats at the State Department of Public Health are just now waking up to the fact that perhaps hundreds of EMT re-certifications have been obtained fraudulently. The public awareness of this practice was triggered recently when some firefighters in the Boston area complained that EMT re-certs were being conducted by one or more private contractors who were filing false reports of non-existent classes and handing out new cards to the “students.”
After the complaint was reported in the newspaper, a major EMS provider in Massachusetts and New Hampshire looked at their own records and discovered that some of their employees had also obtained their re-certs improperly and immediately suspended about 20 of their EMT’s until they were properly qualified (Firegeezer REPORT).
Last week the Boston Globe filed this video update on the growing scandal:
But this really isn’t anything new to them. It was in December 2008 that we reported HERE on a similar case in Hamilton, Massachusetts, where the police department was charged with operating the EMS for the town. They had been not only handing out unearned cards, but many officers were collecting overtime pay for attending the phantom classes. If you don’t recall that case, read our REPORT HERE where we summarized the whole operation. Eventually the police chief and three others were indicted by the State Attorney General (press release HERE) and the city lost its EMS certificate for a year.
Last month the Office of Emergency Medical Services, jogged into having to do something about it, sent out THIS MEMO to the state ambulance agencies ”encouraging” them to be careful in their documentation of their training records. That’s about it so far, although they have turned the recent cases over the the Attorney General’s office for investigation and possible pursuit of criminal charges.
The point that I want to make today is not so much the stories of the fraudulent practices of some trainers, but the failure of the State Office of EMS to (a) realize that this had been going on for untold numbers of years, and (b) not taking action to look into the practice after they were made aware of its presence. It is apparent that they have been comfortable with turning their own responsibilities over to the trainers without ever checking to see if all of them were performing their duties. They have been complacent for so long that this negligence has been institutionalized within the bureaucracy. There is no excuse for this. None.
In my FRD all the EMT recerts were conducted in-house by our own training staff and I can recall that in every instance, every class, a representative from the state Dept. of Health would physically visit the academy and step into the classroom to verify that there was indeed a class being held and that X number of people were in there. They never had any reason to doubt that it wasn’t being done, but they were following good, sound practices of auditing the expenditure of the taxpayers’ money and the validity of the licensing program. The citizens in Massachusetts ought to be wondering why their state employees aren’t exercising the same responsibility. How about your state? Are they doing their job, or are they doing it the “Massachusetts way”?
We’d better exercise our own responsibility now and get this equipment checked out. I need to get some more coffee started. See you back in the day room in a little while.
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