New executive director speaks to community home health plans for the per-diem agency.
Jul 30, 2026
The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by the Maine Seacoast Mission.
SOUTHWEST HARBOR—On the western side of Mount Desert Island, emergency medical services (EMS) and ambulances are a lifeline in medical emergencies and keeping a constant ambulance presence is a priority, representatives of the non-profit Southwest Harbor-Tremont Ambulance Service told Southwest Harbor Select Board members this week.
“As you are well aware, it’s always our goal to have 100% coverage with provider and driver or, when possible, two providers,” Andrew Cline, board president of the service, said, July 28. “And in January through May, we were really close. We had 100% in two of those months and 99 plus in three others.”
June, however, was challenging for the ambulance service and its twenty-member crew.
“We had 41 hours of time that we were not covered, so that represents 94.3% of the time we were covered, but we’re not happy about that,” Cline said.
A paramedic who typically serves 36-40 hours each week had a shoulder replacement in June. Three other members of the crew chose June to take vacation.
“Because we’re a per diem organization, that hurt us with our coverage,” Cline explained. “Unfortunately, a Southwest Harbor family had two separate emergency calls during those times that we weren’t staffed, and they were understandably upset and had to wait for Mount Desert or Southwest Fire to be there to provide care.”
The gaps in the coverage can also occur because the crew might already be responding to a 911 call.
“These instances highlight the importance, the critical importance, of mutual aid with the surrounding towns, with Mount Desert and Bar Harbor,” Cline said.
It’s essential for all the town to have backup. The ambulance service responded for mutual aid 14 times to other towns in the first six months of the year. They also responded to 12 calls from Swan’s Island, meeting the ferry and transporting patients to the hospital.
“Mutual aid is critically important,” he said. “We want to be there every night someone in Southwest Harbor or Tremont calls.”
They are working on beefing up the crew, adding a driver and a paramedic. They’ve also reached out to the Coast Guard, which because it is a federal agency, requires multiple steps for them to be involved.
“We’re working hard to fulfill our mission,” Cline said.
Throughout the country, for approximately a decade, emergency medical services have faced dual difficulties: replacing retiring EMTs and AEMTs, as well as covering operating costs.
“More and more volunteer services are finding this to be untenable,” Brock Slabach, chief operations officer of the National Rural Health Association told North County Radio back in 2021.
Volunteers staff a majority of rural agencies like Southwest Harbor. Almost three-quarters of those rural agencies don’t find volunteers easily.
New Executive Director Kyle Wells thanked the community. Wells started this spring and has been trying to work on the ambulance service’s sustainability, long-term vision, and continuity of care that it gives.
Wells has over 30 years of emergency medical services experience, and was last assistant chief of EMS at AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center in New Jersey, which has 100,000 annual calls for service.
According to its website, “typically over 40% of our calls are not billable,” the ambulance states, which means it depends on donors and fundraising.
Even though the service has gone from 200-300 calls per year six or seven years ago to 500+ calls per year now, the gap between what the ambulance service can make and what it takes to operate keeps getting wider and wider.
Southwest Harbor and Tremont are not any different than any other rural—and even a lot of urban—landscapes when it comes to fire and EMS and even police departments, Wells said.
“It’s the resource, the personnel is so much different. The demands of each of those professions has grown. And so much more is required from each of those people. And we recognize that. And so in the first two months, that’s where a lot of our energy has actually been put on putting together a workforce sustainability strategy,” he said.
One of those strategies is having a director like Wells. Another is to create community medicine options. That strategy began before he arrived.
“We have three people that have just recently been certified to do the community medic,” he said. “And it’s not just medic. So it’s AEMTs, EMTs, all the way through medic. All sorts of level of licensure can do this work at home.”
Hopefully, starting in September, that program will bring health care to people in their homes, which is back to the ambulance’s roots.
According to the service’s website, “The Service began in World War I when the ladies of Tremont and Southwest Harbor gathered together to aid our troops overseas by rolling bandages. However, they soon recognized that there was much that needed doing at home as well. So they formed the Ladies Aid which, in turn, became the Southwest Harbor/Tremont Nursing Association which provided support for a Town Nurse for the area as well as access to home health care equipment through a lending program. Later, largely due to the efforts of Les White, Jr., an ambulance was procured. In 1961, the Association was incorporated under its present name.”
Care at home—before the ambulance, the hospital, or multiple doctor visits—can sometimes reduce costs and simultaneously increase accessibility to healthy outcomes.
According to the National Rural Health Association (NRHA), “One in five Americans lives in a rural community, and in many of those communities, the local hospital is more than a place to receive care.”
“I’ve been here a little over two months, and right out of the gate, I recognize the commitment that the community and the towns and our other first response partners have in making sure that everybody who needs an ambulance gets an ambulance,” Wells said. “So right out of the gate, thank you to everyone. This is an awesome community, and it’s something the likes of which I have not lived in before.”
And when it comes to constant coverage and sustainability?
“We will do it. We want to be solid partners for a very long time to come for everybody involved,” Cline said.
LINKS TO LEARN MORE
Southwest Harbor-Tremont Ambulance Service website
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