I should of known RocketMedic would know!! lol please spill... i see their sign on bonus and its making me wonder lol
Ask and ye shall receive.
First, it is important to know what you are getting into and where you're coming from. You're coming from Oklahoma, which is a pretty limited market with a dearth of viable options (although, from an income-and-experience perspective, Jim Koch has made Pafford's operations somewhat palatable if you can tolerate the shift lengths). You clearly have some knowledge of EMSA and AMR, and trust me, it won't get any better or change much no matter what happens with Williamson and this most recent federal lawsuit. The sad truth is that the trust is too expensive to readily change and if it does, it's going to either become an under-resourced fire-based system or stay essentially the same. AMR isn't great or terrible, they're just the most recent contractor to the trust and they aren't going to rock the boat much. Getting their EMSA-branded non-emergency IFT division is about all the change they'll want; the money comes from transports and their model is built to churn out transports. Goodloe and his crew are most-concerned with research and that's not going to change either; there may be some advanced stuff going on but the culture is going to hammer mistakes or deviations from normal/conservative medicine aggressively because the trust has long since exceeded a realistic span of control and that's the only tool they really know. AMR/EMSA
is an OK place to get experience in EMS as a paramedic and it actually doesn't pay terribly if your standards are low, but it is also easy to get burned out and/or sucked into the drama. In hindsight (and with the full admission that I made my own life there harder than it needed to be), it is an OK place for beginning, but the rewards and income rule heavily against being a long-term place. On the bright side, it is mostly 911 EMS, and the good people of OKC and Tulsa do get sick and hurt a lot and you can help them.
If I was going to look for EMS work in Oklahoma, I would actually look strongly at Pafford in Rogers/McAlester/Sallisaw and a few other places; although their wages and benefits are not exactly where I want them, they have improved and the company does have a diverse, sick service area and a sense of community that EMSA doesn't (and you'll actually make more than anywhere else in the state except BAFD). They're also tolerant of new medics and offer earlier leadership opportunities. Places like REACT, Lifenet and the smaller ones are OK, but I wouldn't stick in the state for them.
Now, on to the Borg. Acadian is technically an employee-owned company, meaning that you get "vested" after three years (I think) and start amassing company stock after one year. This is not publicly-traded stock; it is valued by a private stock assessor that essentially determines what it is worth; also of note is that the company remains under the control of Zuschlag and the core investors so the employees don't really have any stakeholder privileges out of the ordinary; you might as well buy a share of EVHC (AMR) for all that ESOP really matters. But most people starting out don't care about retirement, so let's look at the important stuff.
1. The pay is....mediocre. It's not dissimilar from what you'd earn at EMSA, but you're looking at high-30s to low-40s in pretty much any Acadian operation. The bonuses are nice, but there's a reason that they're there, and the lure of a bonus goes away quickly when you realize that you're earning that bonus instead of a higher salary or better benefits. Speaking of benefits, BC/BS Louisiana is expensive. It's not terrible, and there are overtime opportunities, but it's a lot like EMSA in terms of how you're treated.
However, with the exception of San Antonio (Bexar County), Llano, Bastrop County (run out of Austin) and Pasadena (Houston area) and Port Arthur/SE Texas, you'll be running transfers. They won't be terrible, but it's a company that is oriented far more towards transfers and "private" ambulance work than
anything in Oklahoma, to include private services like Lifenet and Pafford. In very general terms, chasing bonuses is a great way to find out exactly why those bonuses exist in the first place, and although they're certainly nice, there's a lot to be said for the operations that
don't need to wave 15k at you to get you interested in signing up.
2. The areas they cover range from really nice to really, really rural. I honestly didn't mind and don't mind the areas, but you should be aware that Acadian uses integrated dispatch over multiple large metropolitan areas, This means that you could quite literally start a shift in San Antonio and "end" it in Austin. With that being said, they also have gone to 12-hour shifts for the most part, and most of their operations in Texas are SSM. There are stations in their smaller areas.
3. The equipment is OK. Maybe a 62%.
4. The medicine is pretty conservative. Acadian is explicitly
not a pain-free organization, there is no RSI, surgical crike or 911-medic-vent/pump (although they do have a CCT program that has those); Acadian
does have broadly similar protocols to EMSA or Oklahoma state protocols in general terms. It's not terrible like Southern California or Alabama, but it's definitely not the greatest prehospital care ever.
5. The people are pretty much average. It's a reasonably average place. People are people. Some love it, others tolerate it, I disliked it. With that being said, I saw that there was a pretty sharp divide between those who mixed the Kool-Aid and everyone else.
6. The company is
very motivated by profit and money. They literally have envelopes and receipts on the trucks and a system to collect payment from people on non-emergent transfers. They
literally will have you contact families on your day off to get insurance information you may have missed from a 911 call. They are very, very, very profit-oriented, but you won't see it in your paycheck or equipment. Maximum utility. This extends to their approach to things like employee education. CPR, ACLS, PALS, etc? You're paying for that. Even orientation is at a 70% rate until you finish (they don't tell you that). More than anything else, this is what pushed me away from Acadian. Charging me for ACLS when they literally own NEMSA is a travesty.
All in all, I think Acadian is an OK place if you just want to be an ambulance medic and live in their service area. There isn't a whole lot of great about it, but it's not as bad as somewhere like Pauls Valley/Wadley's or Woodward or whatnot. If you want high-density 911 EMS, then you need to look at EMSA or MedStar or something like it
or move to Houston or out east/west. REMSA, MEDIC, AMR Arlington, Albuquerque, Denver, Vegas, Sunstar....you've got good options if you're mobile. If, on the other hand, your goal is to move further fast into clinical medicine, I would seriously look at ED jobs. Really depends on you and what you want to do.
Best of luck!
