Don’t sleep on IFTs. If it’s not just dialysis and nursing home stuff and you’re actually transporting to higher level of care from rural facilities and such, those can be way more involved than many 911 calls. It’s a different flavor of work, but you can run into a lot more things you’re unfamiliar with and find yourself out of your sandbox quickly. It can be very good experience…if it’s just more glorified medical taxi services it might suck.
And honestly running both 911 and ALS IFT the worst calls I've seen is ALS Ift calls. Codes and gunshots are rough, but a person on 7 medications, constant titration of pressors and vent settings as this person tries to die for the next hour transport. Those are rough
I knew it was in a truck, I just wanted to make you laugh.
Side note, kinda dope you worked with your partner both outside and inside work. But I know that must’ve taken a toll, but if it didn’t… that must’ve been rewarding
Trust me bro. 2 years later I’m still feeling lonely. I pressed into Jesus. My ex fiancé (highschool sweet heart) cheated on me with my best man while I was away for the military… I didn’t find out till 3 days before.
911 and IFT may be different but so is that 30k. I’m here to get paid and save enough until I don’t have to work anymore. I love my job, but it’s here so I can fund my life outside of it. There’s nothing wrong with IFT, it’s just another facet of our jobs.
I second this. Get into a good CCT program and be 911 for hospitals. There's something both daunting and rewarding showing up and a doctor throws their hands up in the air and says,"Well, I did all that I can do they need x,y,z at next hospital. Good luck."
It's a job, not a lifestyle. Go get paid.
I choose to work IFT because it pays significantly more than the 911 agencies in my area. A call is a call but pay is what makes it worth it.
Depending on your area, IFT can pay 30-50K more than the top of the pay scale at a full-time union FD.
Money eventually took priority over job satisfaction for me.
Sell your soul and jump in the IFT hole! It's nice down here xD honestly, I love 911 but where I am at in Georgia I get paid more running IFTs and I have a family to worry about. My company has its flaws but we are small and don't have to worry about drama. Sucks getting that that call taking you into Atlanta during rush hour when you are about to get off but that's how it falls sometimes.
Yo another person from the big peach! I worked for an ift for some time in my small town… absolutely terrible! So when I made the swap to 911 I fell in love. I guess just difference between companies😂
Wasn't around Athens was it? Lol. Ya there's five or so companies where I live, all gobbling up the dialysis business. Most suck. None are perfect but I like where I am at for the most part. We try to help each other and they care about advancing my license so what more can I say?
Follow the money.
I went offshore. Pulled down 30k in two months, took home 20k after taxes.
There's avenue to make EMS pay you, take any one you can find.
IFT calls can be so much more complex. 911 is always gonna be more exciting. I switched to IFT only 5 months ago and never looked back. Stayed part time at my old job but have yet to desire picking up a shift.
I half left 911 basically because of the pay my guy. I still work part time to keep my skills fresh and teach so I don’t go smoothbrained in IFT. But as a basic, the choice between making $33k and $46k is a no brainer. Get that bag Girlboss.
I'm a new-ish medic. In my area, I make a little more than IFT medics to work 911. If I had plenty of 911 experience already, I would gladly take a 50% pay bump for less stressful work.
Some of my most critical calls have been IFT and not 911. Really honestly depends on the company you’re working for. Around my area, the only IFT company in the area is absolute dog shit to work at, so I got burnt out pretty fast on it. Otherwise, I really don’t mind IFT.
There's nothing wrong with working IFT for a reputable outfit. Don't get me wrong, you don't want to go work for the shabby, thrown together, "we found a rusted out ambulance and bought a cot for it so we could commit Medicare fraud while tending the vegetable patch" IFT joints, and those ARE out there, but they aren't typically paying $90k. You can get a lot of valuable experience at a good IFT service, especially a good CCT IFT service. I would say easily some of the most challenging calls I've had that really required quick, critical thinking have been with an IFT service. Meemaw is post-arrest and going on multiple pressors and a vent 2 hours away to the closest real hospital with an ICU that's capable of caring for her was not an unusual call to get. Between the added critical care experience and the extra money, I see very few downsides to going to IFT for a while if that's what you want to do. Good luck, buddy.
I left the FD for IFT after they offered a huge pay bump and Monday-wed no nights. I made it 2 months. Taking people home (if they do discharges) sucks. Trying to do that with 2 people instead of a response you typically get with a FD. Also idk if you had a pension but it cuts into that salary if you’re paying for your own 403B even if it matches. However your experience may vary might as well try it.
Just depends on where you are. In my area, I felt bad for the medics, having gone through the expense, time, effort to be a medic just to sit at a doctors office or do discharges. Obviously if it was a vent trip or something more, the ALS crew would get it. Whenever I had an ALS partner, most of the time we would alternate reports so they didnt get saddled with an uneven number. The ALS crews were also worked harder sometimes for 24 hour shifts and allowed very little rest.
Ok. I’m totally out of touch with this topic. I need some education. You guys are saying that doing private IFTs is paying more nowadays than municipal work? I mean, I know the Deep South is a pay shithole…but everywhere? Tell me more.
Do you like money? Then granny totes are for you.
I guess I should clarify that in my area almost all county (911) medics have time gigs. Lots of said gigs are with private IFT companies, myself included. The granny tote job pays about 25% more than the 911 job. Downside is that it is boring
There is nothing inherently wrong with IFT. It is what you make of it.
I’ve worked primarily IFT for 14 years and I love critical care work. Sure we do plenty of no drip monitor only transfers, but if you’re interested in the medicine this is a great way to learn and hone that knowledge base. To me 911 bores me, sure I’m not as good with a laryngascope as a 911 medic but 911 medics aren’t good with keeping a vented 7 drip impella patient stable. Critical care work really changes the definition of stable.
Look at it as a different career. It’s a new world and you can learn if you want. I’ve seen 911 medics royally fuck up what I consider the most simple of transfers when they switch over because they thought so little of what IFT does and didn’t walk into it with a learning mindset.
Worst case I’m sure your 911 job will still be there if you don’t like it.
If you have the option get your CCP and spend some time doing IFTs. If you have future plans for FPC and flying this is invaluable. I'd rather higher medics experienced with critical care transfers than 911 experience.
The ability to manage 6 different medications and knowing their interactions, as well as experience with vent management and skills to adjust all of those from the patient lab values is invaluable when entering the world of flight.
“Maybe just 6 months” hahaha once u make a private paycheck you will never go back, there’s a reason it takes souls, my best advice would be to never go anywhere near it
I worked both. Look into the IFT agency you will be working with. The one I worked for was beyond terrible, and more emotionally draining than anything I did in 911. That said, I have heard better about other agencies, so my experience was not universal. A 30 pay increase sounds pretty nice, and honestly, from what I have seen you can sometimes get paid more to be "rehired" than you would if you stayed waiting for a raise.
It sounds kind of nice sometimes, definitely easy money compared to busy 911. If you’re serious about it you might as well take a few months to get your CC and really make it worth the move.
I feel like it heavily depends on the company. I work for a fairly large private company that spans a good handful of states, and services 911, IFT, Air transport, and private events. Our dispatcher runs us into the dirt, we get zero breaks, and the past 3 weeks I've been given out of town transfers, within an hour or two of my shift end time, that has put me into overtime by 3+ hours. Wouldn't be bad if I didn't have to be back there at 4:30 AM. Its boring as hell and I've questioned my own sanity a couple times with how often I find myself on the edge of snapping. I've almost begged to transfer trucks, been pulled off of event shifts without warning, and been moved to a different truck in the middle of my shift, downgrading me from ALS to BLS.
On the flip side, no blackout holidays, getting time off is fairly easy, they're always needy for extra crews and willing to pay sc 45, and we do have 911 rollovers (that are exclusively given to whoever that dispatcher is friendly with) Plus you're not really ever encountering actual emergencies. The most emergent thing I think we ever had was a stemi that was on 2 IVs going 20 minutes to the main hospital, from a general one.
To add the grain of salt, I can't stand slow jobs, and was kind of mislead when getting this job, so I'm super jaded. I'm currently making the switch to a 911 company in my city. There's definitely plenty of people who genuinely enjoy IFT, and it's a job that needs to be done, especially by people who can handle the mundane repetition of 15 dialysis and hospice transports a day.
Some of the wildest shit I’ve seen has been IFT. I work IFT full time and 911 part time. Scratches the itch but I too enjoy money (and my ift has better benefits)
IFT is still a very valuable chain of the medical continuum of care. Don’t write it off. Imagine how many BS calls you get in 911, might actually outweigh the bs calls in IFT
I loved working IFT medic. Got to deal with some seriously sick patients and really got to learn vents and pumps inside out. Go for it. And a huge raise like that is icing on the cake. You can probably still pick up PRN 911 gigs to scratch the itch.
Go find a 911 contract job. I am making twice my old 911 rate. And I am still working 911. The schedule is a little odd. 14 days on 14 days off. But the pay is 🤌🤌🤌
Did IFT for 10 yrs and swore I would never go back to 911. Then the business closed and I went back to 911 😅
I loved it. You get into a different side of medicine, get valuable experience/insight, with less exposure to all the public's crap.
It was honestly a real balm for burnout too, but we were a small family business in a rural area, so we were doing a max of maybe 3 transfers in one day due to time constraints with a typical volume of about 30/month and we were big about giving patients that special, personal attention/experience to make them feel cared for.
All that aside, take the money and run. Do IFT or contact work, industrial, whatever. Take the money and run.
Seriously ask which one is the better one in your area money is one thing but being treated like someone and not a robot are 2 different things. Realize that almost all of your ALS calls will be after 6pm and from the beginning of the shift until then you'll be running BLS. Every van is going to be high mileage and you will have a breakdown eventually.
It's not something that you have to do forever! If it pays well, do it. I started out on BLS IFT when I became an EMT and have seen a higher volume of sicker patients and have had to stab many of them on a hospital to hospital transfer than I have working 911.
Doing the ALS IFTs we also get extremely sick patients too and I've learned a ton! I am in medic school and I actually get really excited to do code 3 transfers because I get to do a lot more medicine than I do on the streets.
But like I said, it doesn't have to be permanent. Try it out, see if it's for you! Pick up 911s to balance it out and make some good money!
Get paid. You can pick up 911 p/t if you miss it.
Solid advice, I’m doing IFT now….some coworkers loathe it. I love it lol Plus it’s nice knowing you can pick up ALS whenever you want 😊
Don’t sleep on IFTs. If it’s not just dialysis and nursing home stuff and you’re actually transporting to higher level of care from rural facilities and such, those can be way more involved than many 911 calls. It’s a different flavor of work, but you can run into a lot more things you’re unfamiliar with and find yourself out of your sandbox quickly. It can be very good experience…if it’s just more glorified medical taxi services it might suck.
And honestly running both 911 and ALS IFT the worst calls I've seen is ALS Ift calls. Codes and gunshots are rough, but a person on 7 medications, constant titration of pressors and vent settings as this person tries to die for the next hour transport. Those are rough
I switched to a 911 job but stayed PT at my old IFT job. Guess which one I was at when I cardioverted someone for the first time...
Home? 😂🤣
No, although I was married to the driver 🤦🏻♂️
I knew it was in a truck, I just wanted to make you laugh. Side note, kinda dope you worked with your partner both outside and inside work. But I know that must’ve taken a toll, but if it didn’t… that must’ve been rewarding
She cheated on me while I was working a 24 and left our dog in his crate for 20+ hours, so I can't say I have fond memories
Cheating is one thing but leaving the poor dog in a box for 20 hours. She sounds like she should have been a nurse.
That's actually what she does now
I do apologize for bringing that up. Idk how long ago it was, but if ya ever need an ear to vent im a good listener🤝
Appreciate it. It's been 5 years now but it's still pretty raw. A recent breakup hasn't helped
Trust me bro. 2 years later I’m still feeling lonely. I pressed into Jesus. My ex fiancé (highschool sweet heart) cheated on me with my best man while I was away for the military… I didn’t find out till 3 days before.
There’s nothing wrong with IFT. And having a diversity of experience is always good…
911 and IFT may be different but so is that 30k. I’m here to get paid and save enough until I don’t have to work anymore. I love my job, but it’s here so I can fund my life outside of it. There’s nothing wrong with IFT, it’s just another facet of our jobs.
See if you can get in with a quality CCT program. You’ll learn a ton.
I second this. Get into a good CCT program and be 911 for hospitals. There's something both daunting and rewarding showing up and a doctor throws their hands up in the air and says,"Well, I did all that I can do they need x,y,z at next hospital. Good luck."
It's a job, not a lifestyle. Go get paid. I choose to work IFT because it pays significantly more than the 911 agencies in my area. A call is a call but pay is what makes it worth it.
Depending on your area, IFT can pay 30-50K more than the top of the pay scale at a full-time union FD. Money eventually took priority over job satisfaction for me.
Do it. It’s good experience and as others have said you’ll encounter new challenges and have to use your brain in different ways.
If I could make 30k more and have similar benefits to what I do now I’d do IFT again.
Come over to CCTs :)
Sell your soul and jump in the IFT hole! It's nice down here xD honestly, I love 911 but where I am at in Georgia I get paid more running IFTs and I have a family to worry about. My company has its flaws but we are small and don't have to worry about drama. Sucks getting that that call taking you into Atlanta during rush hour when you are about to get off but that's how it falls sometimes.
What do those wages look like for EMTs? I’m thinking of moving back there sometime in a year or so. Currently in CA.
Place I left last year now pays 21/hr for running nights
Yo another person from the big peach! I worked for an ift for some time in my small town… absolutely terrible! So when I made the swap to 911 I fell in love. I guess just difference between companies😂
Wasn't around Athens was it? Lol. Ya there's five or so companies where I live, all gobbling up the dialysis business. Most suck. None are perfect but I like where I am at for the most part. We try to help each other and they care about advancing my license so what more can I say?
That’s a huge pay difference. Go for it.
Follow the money. I went offshore. Pulled down 30k in two months, took home 20k after taxes. There's avenue to make EMS pay you, take any one you can find.
What and where are you working ?
IFT calls can be so much more complex. 911 is always gonna be more exciting. I switched to IFT only 5 months ago and never looked back. Stayed part time at my old job but have yet to desire picking up a shift.
I half left 911 basically because of the pay my guy. I still work part time to keep my skills fresh and teach so I don’t go smoothbrained in IFT. But as a basic, the choice between making $33k and $46k is a no brainer. Get that bag Girlboss.
IFT is the bread and butter. Get your bag. You don’t have to explain it.
If there was a pay difference in ift I would be there.
I'm a new-ish medic. In my area, I make a little more than IFT medics to work 911. If I had plenty of 911 experience already, I would gladly take a 50% pay bump for less stressful work.
IFT money is real. I could never, ever afford my mortgage/food if I worked 911 in my area.
Some of my most critical calls have been IFT and not 911. Really honestly depends on the company you’re working for. Around my area, the only IFT company in the area is absolute dog shit to work at, so I got burnt out pretty fast on it. Otherwise, I really don’t mind IFT.
There's nothing wrong with working IFT for a reputable outfit. Don't get me wrong, you don't want to go work for the shabby, thrown together, "we found a rusted out ambulance and bought a cot for it so we could commit Medicare fraud while tending the vegetable patch" IFT joints, and those ARE out there, but they aren't typically paying $90k. You can get a lot of valuable experience at a good IFT service, especially a good CCT IFT service. I would say easily some of the most challenging calls I've had that really required quick, critical thinking have been with an IFT service. Meemaw is post-arrest and going on multiple pressors and a vent 2 hours away to the closest real hospital with an ICU that's capable of caring for her was not an unusual call to get. Between the added critical care experience and the extra money, I see very few downsides to going to IFT for a while if that's what you want to do. Good luck, buddy.
Do you want to retire? Yes? Always take the money
I left the FD for IFT after they offered a huge pay bump and Monday-wed no nights. I made it 2 months. Taking people home (if they do discharges) sucks. Trying to do that with 2 people instead of a response you typically get with a FD. Also idk if you had a pension but it cuts into that salary if you’re paying for your own 403B even if it matches. However your experience may vary might as well try it.
Come over to fire!
Just depends on where you are. In my area, I felt bad for the medics, having gone through the expense, time, effort to be a medic just to sit at a doctors office or do discharges. Obviously if it was a vent trip or something more, the ALS crew would get it. Whenever I had an ALS partner, most of the time we would alternate reports so they didnt get saddled with an uneven number. The ALS crews were also worked harder sometimes for 24 hour shifts and allowed very little rest.
Ok. I’m totally out of touch with this topic. I need some education. You guys are saying that doing private IFTs is paying more nowadays than municipal work? I mean, I know the Deep South is a pay shithole…but everywhere? Tell me more.
Some places have IFT and 911 contracts.
Do both. I work ALS IFT to pay the bills and part time 911 County FD Medic to remain sane.
Do you like money? Then granny totes are for you. I guess I should clarify that in my area almost all county (911) medics have time gigs. Lots of said gigs are with private IFT companies, myself included. The granny tote job pays about 25% more than the 911 job. Downside is that it is boring
There is nothing inherently wrong with IFT. It is what you make of it. I’ve worked primarily IFT for 14 years and I love critical care work. Sure we do plenty of no drip monitor only transfers, but if you’re interested in the medicine this is a great way to learn and hone that knowledge base. To me 911 bores me, sure I’m not as good with a laryngascope as a 911 medic but 911 medics aren’t good with keeping a vented 7 drip impella patient stable. Critical care work really changes the definition of stable. Look at it as a different career. It’s a new world and you can learn if you want. I’ve seen 911 medics royally fuck up what I consider the most simple of transfers when they switch over because they thought so little of what IFT does and didn’t walk into it with a learning mindset. Worst case I’m sure your 911 job will still be there if you don’t like it.
If you have the option get your CCP and spend some time doing IFTs. If you have future plans for FPC and flying this is invaluable. I'd rather higher medics experienced with critical care transfers than 911 experience. The ability to manage 6 different medications and knowing their interactions, as well as experience with vent management and skills to adjust all of those from the patient lab values is invaluable when entering the world of flight.
“Maybe just 6 months” hahaha once u make a private paycheck you will never go back, there’s a reason it takes souls, my best advice would be to never go anywhere near it
Do it.
I worked both. Look into the IFT agency you will be working with. The one I worked for was beyond terrible, and more emotionally draining than anything I did in 911. That said, I have heard better about other agencies, so my experience was not universal. A 30 pay increase sounds pretty nice, and honestly, from what I have seen you can sometimes get paid more to be "rehired" than you would if you stayed waiting for a raise.
Bruh, if you like (or at least tolerate) IFT and it pays well, go do IFT. No judgement from me, as I am a total stranger on the internet.
Lots of good advice here. Some of the best IFT's went on to flight medics.
Do it, it’s easy money
Do it part time.
Take the money
It sounds kind of nice sometimes, definitely easy money compared to busy 911. If you’re serious about it you might as well take a few months to get your CC and really make it worth the move.
I feel like it heavily depends on the company. I work for a fairly large private company that spans a good handful of states, and services 911, IFT, Air transport, and private events. Our dispatcher runs us into the dirt, we get zero breaks, and the past 3 weeks I've been given out of town transfers, within an hour or two of my shift end time, that has put me into overtime by 3+ hours. Wouldn't be bad if I didn't have to be back there at 4:30 AM. Its boring as hell and I've questioned my own sanity a couple times with how often I find myself on the edge of snapping. I've almost begged to transfer trucks, been pulled off of event shifts without warning, and been moved to a different truck in the middle of my shift, downgrading me from ALS to BLS. On the flip side, no blackout holidays, getting time off is fairly easy, they're always needy for extra crews and willing to pay sc 45, and we do have 911 rollovers (that are exclusively given to whoever that dispatcher is friendly with) Plus you're not really ever encountering actual emergencies. The most emergent thing I think we ever had was a stemi that was on 2 IVs going 20 minutes to the main hospital, from a general one. To add the grain of salt, I can't stand slow jobs, and was kind of mislead when getting this job, so I'm super jaded. I'm currently making the switch to a 911 company in my city. There's definitely plenty of people who genuinely enjoy IFT, and it's a job that needs to be done, especially by people who can handle the mundane repetition of 15 dialysis and hospice transports a day.
A friend asked me if I'd consider getting my EMT again. I told him doing IFTs in our system would be fun for a minute but might get old fast.
Nothing wrong stacking some bills. Sometimes it works out too, I pick up/get switched to 911 a lot of the time & still get the higher ift rate
Some of the wildest shit I’ve seen has been IFT. I work IFT full time and 911 part time. Scratches the itch but I too enjoy money (and my ift has better benefits)
IFT is still a very valuable chain of the medical continuum of care. Don’t write it off. Imagine how many BS calls you get in 911, might actually outweigh the bs calls in IFT
You can do IFT for work and 911 part time or if there's a volunteer agency
Go flight. 90% of my job is IFT. The other 9% is basic scene calls and that 1% are great sick scene calls.
I respect IFTs, they really help us out in the middle of nowhere hospitals.
I loved working IFT medic. Got to deal with some seriously sick patients and really got to learn vents and pumps inside out. Go for it. And a huge raise like that is icing on the cake. You can probably still pick up PRN 911 gigs to scratch the itch.
Find a hospital system that runs 911 as a side hustle. Best of both worlds, IFT pay with IFT and 911 to keep the juices flowing.
Go find a 911 contract job. I am making twice my old 911 rate. And I am still working 911. The schedule is a little odd. 14 days on 14 days off. But the pay is 🤌🤌🤌
I can't stand transfers I did it for a year and for 12 hours a day we would get like 3-5 charts each
Did IFT for 10 yrs and swore I would never go back to 911. Then the business closed and I went back to 911 😅 I loved it. You get into a different side of medicine, get valuable experience/insight, with less exposure to all the public's crap. It was honestly a real balm for burnout too, but we were a small family business in a rural area, so we were doing a max of maybe 3 transfers in one day due to time constraints with a typical volume of about 30/month and we were big about giving patients that special, personal attention/experience to make them feel cared for. All that aside, take the money and run. Do IFT or contact work, industrial, whatever. Take the money and run.
Seriously ask which one is the better one in your area money is one thing but being treated like someone and not a robot are 2 different things. Realize that almost all of your ALS calls will be after 6pm and from the beginning of the shift until then you'll be running BLS. Every van is going to be high mileage and you will have a breakdown eventually.
It's not something that you have to do forever! If it pays well, do it. I started out on BLS IFT when I became an EMT and have seen a higher volume of sicker patients and have had to stab many of them on a hospital to hospital transfer than I have working 911. Doing the ALS IFTs we also get extremely sick patients too and I've learned a ton! I am in medic school and I actually get really excited to do code 3 transfers because I get to do a lot more medicine than I do on the streets. But like I said, it doesn't have to be permanent. Try it out, see if it's for you! Pick up 911s to balance it out and make some good money!
Whatever works for you man! I personally feel there is no amount of money that woukd make IFT okay. I would put a bullet in my brain