Southwest Ambulance Reviews

Former Employee – worked at Southwest Ambulance full-time for more than 10 years

Pros – Working with the different fire departments in Maricopa and Pinal counties and interaction with hospital staff.

Cons – Lower management needs to improve their management skills

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Southwest Ambulance full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Good work schedule. Field personnel are exceptional.

Cons – Union that is in place is weak and more company than employee advocates. Very reactive rather than proactive. Untrained field supervisors. Corporate management is disorganized and poor. No managerial support for employees. Employees are not appreciated and looked at as "slave labor". No encouragement for long-term retention. High turnover rate due to early employee burnout. Poor equipment.

Advice to Senior Management – Listen to and appreciate your employees. Try to encourage long-term employee retention. Train your field personnel in proper management techniques and demeanor. Be proactive in your industry. Re-organize administrative and field management.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Southwest Ambulance full-time for more than a year

Pros – Great experience for emergency medical personel

Cons – This is a stepping stone job and they treat it as such. Do not expect to put in your 20 years, there are much better opportunities out there. Untrained management. Zero follow through. Bad training department.

Advice to Senior Management – Get a degree and learn how to work harder. Use training as an asset not a punishment. Obey policies, not at your own discretion. Figure out how to follow through on all projects, issues and problems.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Southwest Ambulance full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – - Great co-workers (for the most part)

- If you enjoy doing patient care or driving, aspects of this job are extremely rewarding.

Cons – - Terrible, terrible pay (raises are frozen)

- Benefits leave something to be desired and expensive

- Management is useless - I'm sure they actually do something, but it's hard to tell what. They certainly never intervene on behalf of field crews. If something goes wrong, you're on your own. Also, only expect to hear from them when you've done something wrong. If you're golden, you won't be hearing a peep. If you have valid complaints with the way you're treated or the way the company functions, they're very quick to remind you where the door is.

- Poor equipment that malfunctions regularly - such as ventilators right in the middle of vent patient calls.

- Ambulances that break down with alarming regularity, have poor brakes, have poor suspension (I believe that some of my patients have ended up in worse shape than I found them because of how poorly some of our ambulances run), have godawful air conditioning. My currently ambulance is just about to roll over 600,000 miles and I have it on good authority that the odometer has rolled over once.

- Dispatch is utterly incompetent and often times mean-spirited. Expect to be sent on calls with blatantly incorrect information, expect to be sent to the wrong address, expect to be dispatched without nearly enough time to get to your destination AND if you're interfacility, expect to be sent on calls outside of your scope of practice, expect to be sent to Tuscon for a wait and return when you've got 3 hours left in your shirt, expect to be punished for many shifts to come if you happen to cross the wrong person with a real or perceived slight, expect to be treated with contempt.

- Corporate does whatever it wants with as little notice as possible. Changing the entire interfacility schedule with less than two weeks notice when everyone who was hard bid did so to correspond with their school and childcare schedules? Why not! It'll get some corporate suit his six-figure bonus, so hey. Demolish coverage so that what few crews are left up at any given time never stop running, always end up being held over and still can't make their arrival times because we're going from AJ to Goodyear and back again in a single day? Why not? Diesel is cheaper than actually running a well functioning company, right?

Advice to Senior Management – - Get it together. In my almost four years at SW (in which I have worked interfacility, EMS, CC), I've met maybe two employees (who have been there longer than 6 months) who are genuinely happy with this job. If you're not there to support the field employees, then what purpose to do you serve?

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Southwest Ambulance

Pros – Great co-workers. The people they hire are fun people that create a family like atmosphere. The work normally keeps you engaged, because your doing multiple tasks. Easy dress code.

Cons – Horrible management, it seems like as long as you know someone in a management position, you can be a manager of some sort. Which is not good because most of the managers aren't truly qualified for what they do. It does not good opprotunity for job growth. Health benefits aren't that great, especially to be in the medical industry. Wishy washy policies that hold up for some and not others. No praise for doing good work, constant repremand, out dated computers. This isn't just my opinion, ask the best employee that works here! Overall moral is close to the drain.

Advice to Senior Management – Praise your employees for the great job that they do. Stick to policies and take the grey out of them. Support your employees. Look for people who are qualified to be in a management position.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Southwest Ambulance

Pros – The only pro to working for this company is that the job allows the very rewarding feeling of providing life-saving care to people in need. Love the job, hate the company.

Cons – very high deductible health insurance, very poor communication to field level employees, old ambulances that spend as much time in the shop as on the road, ancient heart monitors that do not even have 12-lead capability in many cases.

Advice to Senior Management – Tell the employees what is going on! There is no useful communication between upper management and field level employees. The company's equipment is in a sad state - older-than-dirt ambulances that constantly break and sub-par medical equipment that I wouldn't trust to be placed on me. Buy new equipment and ambulances. It is embarassing what type of equipment and ambulances we use on critically ill patients.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend