Louisville Metro EMS has been in the news lately with a number of disciplinary issues. Most of the cases have been drug related, leading the Department to declare a “zero tolerance” for illegal drug use. You may recall the case of Tammy Renee Brewer, who was charged with murder in 2008 following a fatal ambulance accident where she was driving an ambulance while impaired on methadone. She subsequently pled guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
The Department and the local Teamsters union that represents the EMS employees reached an agreement on August 11, 2011 which will require that every employee to undergo drug testing in the coming weeks. As per the agreement the employees will not know when they are to be tested and could be subjected to multiple drug tests over the next few months.
Some of the recent charges faced by the EMS employees are :
- In July Paramedics Ben Neal, Joseph Bratcher, and Samuel Fife, and EMT Robert Gant were suspended while police investigated allegations that they were involved in the distribution and illegal use of controlled substances.
- Also in July EMT David Fife was suspended from the department while he was the subject of a criminal investigation.
- Louisville Metro EMS Major Roger Parvin, who was responsible for managing expiration dates of controlled substances, was terminated from the department after he took 180 vials of controlled substances that had reached their expiration dates to his home rather than destroying them.
- Louisville Metro EMS – EMT and Iraq war veteran Alex Brown was arrested for DUI and possession of drugs off duty after being involved in an non-injury accident. He was suspended from the department.
Louisville Metro has approximately 250 employees. More on the story.
It sounds to me like management finally is getting their act together. I think it is critical that when they start the testing of employees that they deal firmly with the first employees to test dirty. They need send a message that this policy is for real or else it is not going to do what it needs to do. Your blurb listed at least eight employees from a group of 250 that were involves in this mess. That is too many. Well, one is too many. But eight is enough to seriously undermine the public’s confidence in the organization as a whole.
Anthony
The drug testing appears to be long overdue – but when I see groups of discipline cases like this I can’t help but wonder if the misconduct (in this case the drug issue) is the problem – or the symptom of a deeper problem. If there is a deeper problem – spanking drug abusing paramedics solves one issue, but does not get to the heart of the matter.
I’d be looking deeper into the cultural issues that allowed this problem to (a) develop and (b) perpetuate. If the cause of the problem is not addressed, the real problem will merely resurface at a later date in a different way.
You hit the nail on the head. For that many members of the agency to have a drug problem you have to look at the culture of the agency. Is drug abuse tolerated in that agency or do supervisors ignore it?
Once upon time we had bars in Volley fire stations in New York – I’d guess in other states too. There were a lot of blind eyes turned to members responding while intoxicated and abusing alcohol in general. That has changed as the culture of the fire service in general has changed. I am sure there still are pockets of this old culture in some departments. I also am sure that there are some with similar drug problems.
With the resources invested in training personnel, it is a real waste to let them implode like this. Ignoring this problem only makes things worse.