Durham County EMS Pours Cold Water on '30,000 Hours of Overtime' Story

“Records show EMS employees worked more than 30,000 hours of overtime amid staffing crunch.” That eye-catching headline was posted on WRAL.com, the NBC local affiliate for Raleigh, North Carolina, in early September 2025.

“EMS workers in Durham County earned nearly $2 million in overtime in just one year, according to records obtained by WRAL Investigates through a public records request,” said the report. “The amount is a testament to the need for additional employees, and an indication of how many shifts existing workers have to pick up to ensure someone is available to respond to emergencies.”

But as Durham County Office of Emergency Services Director Mark Lockhart explained, the raw numbers tell only part of the story. He told EMS World that the numbers reported by WRAL were accurate, but they were not explained in their proper context.

“What the county gave WRAL was a summary of total overtime earned,” said Lockhart. “The thing is, our folks work 12-hour shifts. During each pay period, they have what we call scheduled overtime. If they work an 84-hour cycle, they're getting four hours of overtime on that check. Unfortunately, the county’s payroll system does not discern between scheduled overtime versus unscheduled or additional overtime. The numbers that were provided to the reporter reflected overall overtime, not unscheduled overtime alone caused by staffing issues.”

“During the interview, WRAL reporter Sarah Krueger asked me if I was surprised by the numbers,” Lockhart continued. “I said yes, and I was absolutely surprised by the numbers, and she asked what surprised me the most? To which I said, well, I think what surprised me the most is we came in $230,000 under our overtime budget. And so, while it appears that we had a significant amount of overtime, part of that was just the normally scheduled, expected overtime.”

Although the WRAL report didn’t include this quote from Lockhart, it did make the following comment: “The records show $1,709,670.15 in EMS OT was spent during that time, for a total of 34,627.77 hours worked … The overtime spending came in under the $1.9 million allotted by the county. The amount of overtime spending is down slightly from $1,765,876.25 in the prior year.”

Given these facts, a more accurate headline for this WRAL story would have been, “Despite staffing shortage, Durham County EMS underspends overtime budget, spending less than previous year.” Still, despite over-hyping the overtime hours at Durham County EMS (DCEMS), the WRAL report was accurate when it said that 39 of the agency’s 179 positions are vacant.

“We are in a staffing crunch, much like many EMS agencies across the country,” Lockhart said.

“We haven’t been able to recruit and retain the number of staff that we need in order to expand our service. On a good day with everybody at work, we're staffing 19 units on the street. Within the last year or so, the average number in daytime has been closer to 15 units. In some cases, like today, it's down to 13.”

To cope with this staffing shortage, DCEMS is “trying to recruit and onboard folks as quickly as we can while fighting an attrition rate,” he said. To attract new hires, the agency is running an eight-week EMS academy as its onboarding process for new EMTs, AEMTs, and paramedics, followed by a field training and evaluation program.

“Overall, this approach has been very successful in getting folks ready to hit the streets running,” Lockhart said.

Meanwhile, DCEMS is trying to retain staff by offering competitive wages and benefits to its employees. “We are not the top-paying agency in the region, but we are one of the top agencies,” Lockhart said. “We’re also able to offer a pretty diverse portfolio of calls. We have everything from the urban downtown area of Durham to the more rural farmland settings that we have in Bahama or Redwood. With that comes a pretty wide variety of patients.”

Although DCEMS is paying a lot of overtime and does need more staff, it’s not a paradise for people looking to build their overtime hours to the maximum.

“What we would like people to take away from this story is that DCEMS is always looking for EMTs, AEMTs, and paramedics,” Lockhart said. “This is a great place to live and work. We see a wide variety of patients and calls in both urban and rural settings, have phenomenal medical direction through Duke University Hospital, and we are only three to four hours from the mountains and about two hours from the beach!”