Modern Solutions for Modern Problems- Re-Imagining the Public Safety Retirement System
One of the greatest injustices to EMS is the tendency of 9-5’ers to treat it like a 9-5. We can’t do that anymore. The traditional retirement system was invented in 1889 in Germany and was based on the idea that the physical body does not hold up beyond 70 years of age and so, the government has a social responsibility to support those who can no longer support themselves. In 1916, the retirement age was lowered to 65 and in 1934, the US Federal Railroad System adopted the same set of guidelines as it was shown that 65 years of age was more or less, fiscally sustainable through payroll taxes and was finally implemented in the social security administration years later. US Employers piggyback off this idea and follow the same blueprint.
Now, 134 years later and with so many jobs of the day now nonexistent and a plethora of mental health research available, we’re still using a system that takes only the physical body into account. The EMS system is an entirely different entity and deserves a unique blueprint that accounts for repetitive stress, long hours, and sleep deprivation that we endure. Our minds are giving out before our bodies, but really, even that is a fallacy because our bodies are giving out because of our minds. Physical and mental health are irrefutably connected and should be treated as such. Therefore, I propose a new idea: The points-based retirement system.
This idea has roots in the points-based demobilization system at the end of WW2 in which US soldiers were given credit for months of service, months deployed, combat service medals, and number of children at home. It lent credence to the mental stresses of combat and quantified when a soldier had suffered enough. This seems like a much better system for high stress occupations. I imagine a retirement system in which EMS providers are given credit for years of service, number of calls run, type of calls run, etc. This was not available to us in the past but with the implementation of the electronic reporting system, there is now a trackable dataset for every call that EMS providers respond to. This idea requires development and research to quantifiably establish which calls create the greatest mental stress and define a limit for when enough is enough, but if research showed that at 10,000 points, the risk of suicide or burnout increases exponentially, then maybe we set the limit at 9,000. I imagine it looking something like this:
· Years of Service: 100 Points/Year
· # of Calls Run: 0.2 points/call
· Sick Person Call: 0.1 points
· Pediatric Cardiac Arrest: 10 points
· Cardiac Arrest (Persons over 65 years of age): 2 points
And so on and so forth. It’s not perfect but it is measurable, able to be studied and refined, and it’s better than an arbitrary age plucked out of thin air by politicians and accountants 134 years ago. What gets measured gets managed and those who have dedicated their lives to service are owed an exploration of this idea at the very least.