Should small towns still have volunteer EMS?

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In the US, emergency services are sometimes provided not by paid workers, but by volunteers, and which one it is can differ depending on where you are.

This chart shows that in urban areas, the majority of emergency medical services agencies are staffed entirely by paid employees. In the more isolated rural areas of the US, it's the complete opposite. These are the regions of the US that need volunteers for their emergency services to run. But there's a problem. Back in 1984, there were nearly 900, 000 volunteer firefighters in the US.

By 2020, that number had dropped by more than 220,000. When you consider the

US population grew by 100 million people during that time, that's almost a 50% decline per capita. The US, especially in its small towns, needs more volunteers than it has. This isn't a sudden crisis. It's been unraveling for decades. This is not something that just popped up overnight. These wheels were set in motion going all the way back to the 60s and 70s.

The new fire station in town is manned entirely by volunteers, people who give their time to a

community service. Almost 70% of rural EMS providers have reported having difficulty in recruiting volunteers. And now the community is looking around realizing that they got a free ride for the first 30 or 40 years. And now how do we backfill it? So, why are small town volunteers once the backbone of emergency response disappearing?

Hi, this is the third of three videos we're doing on how emergency help gets to remote places. Rural parts of the US often struggle to get the same services as more populated regions. We wanted to explore what those challenges look like and what might be done to make things better. And we're grateful to our sponsor T-Mobile for supporting this video.