Northern Light’s planned ambulance cuts will affect three rural towns

By Marie Weidmayer, Bangor Daily News Staff

After nearly 15 years, Northern Light Mayo Hospital will no longer keep a staffed ambulance at the Corinth Fire Department.

Ambulances will now drive at least 20 minutes from Dover-Foxcroft or Dexter when there is a medical emergency in the towns of Corinth, Bradford, or Charleston. The move is concerning officials who are saying it could lead to longer response times and stress volunteer fire departments in those towns. 

It is another example of Northern Light Health cutting costs, this time by getting rid of a contract it inherited after acquiring the Dover-Foxcroft hospital in 2019. Northern Light is struggling to hire and retain staff across its network. It reported a $36 million operating loss in 2023 and losses in 2024 appear to be worse.

Seven towns in the Bangor area learned this summer that they now need to pay Northern Light for ambulance responses instead of being paid to respond to calls.

Northern Light Mayo Hospital sent a letter to the Corinth town manager on Aug. 13, saying the long-term contract ends Sept. 12. After that, it will remove the ambulance and various equipment and furniture from the fire station.

The ambulances will still respond to medical emergencies in the towns, but there is no guarantee of an ambulance responding from the health care system depending on how many other calls are happening at the same time, Corinth Fire Capt. James Seymour said.

“The fire department is very concerned about emergency response for the town of Corinth,” Seymour said. “It doesn’t sound like they’re still going to guarantee a response. They’re going to try to but nothing’s guaranteed.”

The hospital has not shared any plans on staffing or adding additional ambulances to the two ambulances in Dover-Foxcroft and the one in Dexter, Seymour said.

Consolidating the ambulance service is because of issues staffing the Corinth location, Northern Light spokesperson Andrew Soucier said. Emergency medicine services across the state are struggling with staffing, he noted. 

Corinth first signed a contract with Mayo Hospital in 2009, which placed an ambulance in the fire department. Northern Light inherited the contract when it bought the hospital in 2019. It ended in either 2021 or 2022 and the two sides started negotiating a new contract in April, Seymour said.

Part of the contract said Northern Light needed to provide a licensed emergency medicine clinician from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. seven days a week, which the health care system violated nearly 13 percent of the time in 2023, according to an audit the fire department did. During overnight shifts, Northern Light was expected to provide two employees, which they failed to staff 95 times, with either nobody there or only one employee, according to the data.

Northern Light cannot confirm the data Corinth provided by the staffing issues are “exactly why” the ambulance service is being consolidated, Soucier said. 

Corinth never violated its staffing requirements in 2023, something the department is proud of, Seymour said. The fire department chose to not raise any complaints about Northern Light’s failures because they needed the ambulance service to protect the town, he said.

“We’re quite disappointed that it’s being removed from here,” Seymour said. “We’re really nervous about the health and well being of our citizens due to that.”

The regional approach for ambulances is similar to how Northern Light covers other rural communities in the area, Soucier said. The hospital will continue to work with other Northern Light emergency medicine services to “provide an ambulance as promptly as possible in Corinth, Charleston, and Bradford,” he said.

While the changes are unexpected and concerning, Seymour said the fire department has its own ambulance which they bought with a grant in 2017. They are working to update it with additional grant funding and are licensed for emergency medicine technicians.

However, the department doesn’t have the staff to run the ambulance 24/7. They are talking with the town’s select board to figure out next steps, Seymour said. For now, the fire department’s ambulance will only respond to emergencies in Corinth, he added.

“We want to make sure the town of Corinth is adequately protected,” he said.