American Ambulance Services to leave Jacksonville Area July 17th

By Benjamin Cox on April 20, 2018 at 9:17am

American Ambulance Services announced that they will be leaving the Jacksonville area after 6 years of service. According to the company, there are too few EMS specialists in the West Central Illinois Area. At the end of American Ambulance service in Jacksonville, all Jacksonville employees will be transferred over to Springfield.

Phil McCarty is the Director of Emergency Management for the city of Jacksonville.

McCarty speaks about how the departure of American Ambulance leaves only one ambulance provider remaining in Jacksonville, LifeStar, and how city leaders are working diligently to be prepared for American’s departure.

The city leaders have been in contact with LifeStar to see how they are going to possibly step up to assess the need and fill some of the resources that will be leaving with American Ambulance. We will be working to monitor that over the next 90 days to insure the safety of the citizens of the community.”

McCarty discusses why American was quite generous in giving a 90 day notice and how this greatly benefits emergency management and city officials in preparations for their departure.

To say there will be no impact of American leaving would be an inappropriate statement. However, we are going to work over the next 90 days to insure that we mitigate any impact that may be created by then. American Ambulance was kind enough to give us a 90 day notice, so we’re going to use those days to work with our current providers, not only LifeStar Ambulance but all the providers in the county.”

McCarty sheds a positive light on use of statistics in research for emergency preparedness.

We’re just gonna continue to work with the data to make sure that we can provide the services. It’s really hard to predict emergencies. There’s no way to predict them. It’s not an easy thing to predict. It may be even harder than predicting the weather from time to time. However, we do have data that we are going to continue to work off of and work together to make sure that we have a solution – a long term solution.”

The official last day for American Ambulance services in Jacksonville is July Seventeenth.