A national ambulance company is looking to expand in the Akron area after a competitor apparently closed late last week.
MedCorp abruptly shut down on Friday, according to published reports. The medical transport company has an Akron location on South Main Street.
The Toledo Blade reported that an operator answering MedCorp’s administration line Saturday morning said she was taking calls “and advising that we are no longer in business.”
The newspaper reported that several MedCorp employees who worked at sites in Toledo and the Columbus area were told Friday night not to report to work.
Phone calls to MedCorp’s Akron location and corporate offices in Toledo and to its parent company, First Med EMS in North Carolina, were unanswered on Monday.
The company’s website had a message indicating it was down for maintenance.
American Medical Response (AMR) is seeking to hire about 20 to 30 new employees for its Northeast Ohio operations within the next month or two to expand and accommodate the additional volume from MedCorp’s closure, said Thomas Maxian, AMR’s Ohio general manager.
AMR has been getting calls from former clients of MedCorp, which had contracts with several area nursing homes and hospitals for medical transports, Maxian said.
“They literally shut their doors,” he said of MedCorp. “For us, the timing was really interesting because we’re starting a little bit of an expansion. We’re looking to hire some paramedics, EMTs and wheelchair van operators.”
AMR recently reached a new three-year labor agreement with the International Association of EMTs and Paramedics (IAEP) Local 43, effective Saturday.
The majority of AMR’s 120 employees in Northeast Ohio are represented by the union, Maxian said.
“There are good increases in each job class per hour and all the pay is based on experience,” he said.
In a news release, IAEP President Mary E. Scott said “AMR’s new management team has treated us with respect, has been responsive to our needs and is willing to work with us to address issues and resolve problems.”
AMR handles the city of Akron’s Code 2 transports, or those 911 calls that are deemed nonlife-threatening. The company has about 25,000 ambulance transports in Northeast Ohio annually, Maxian said.
AMR, a subsidiary of Envision Healthcare Corp., is based in Greenwood Village, Colo. The company provides medical transportation services in 40 states and employs more than 19,000 paramedics EMTs, RNs and other professional transport workers nationwide.
Cheryl Powell can be reached at 330-996-3902 or cpowell@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow Powell on Twitter at twitter.com/abjcherylpowell.