Pros
Co-workers can be great to be around Some of the supervisors are nice There are lots of different shifts to work around your schedule (when they become available) The pay is the highest in the Puget sound for EMTs (17.60 for 2020) It's no worse than all the private ambulance companies in the area (NW, Falck, Tri-Med)
Cons
-The Seattle location (Tukwila based) has committed to mass hiring and mass turn over as new hires cost less and are less likely to complain -To meet the mass hire needs, anyone with an EMT cert is offered a job leading to many bad EMTs in the field -There is no incentive (financially, recognition based, or any other) to be a better EMT than the minimum level of competency -AMR knows Seattle currently has no better option for BLS transport so it doesn't care to strive to be better -It is made clear you are almost entirely just transport. Fire shows up on scene and you are asked to drive within a few blocks of the scene but are not to go on scene until they call for you. Fire will have triaged, done the splinting, bleeding control (and all the "emergency" activities), then you come in to transport to the hospital. Some fire crews dislike dealing with AMR and will make it clear that you are only there to transport their patient. Also known to some fire fighters as a "Spicy Uber" -The only calls you're first on scene for are "patch throughs" where a 911 dispatcher believes the call is so trivial that Fire does not need to go -ED staff believe you to be incompetent and are often short with you while giving report -Everyone knows and has accepted that EMTs are expendable. That there is no point in trying to change the culture as AMR is just there to fill the gap in Seattle's EMS system of transporting non sick patients to the hospital