×

Happy to help

BROOKLINE – For Emergency Medical Technician Janice Watt, being a volunteer for the Brookline Ambulance Service was an earnest path that began in high school.

“I wouldn’t necessarily call it a career in the sense that I would be making money doing it,” Watt said. “But it was it was a path for me that I wanted to follow ever since I was 18 years old.”

Watt is a proud member of the BAS’s squad of volunteer paramedics and EMTs.

“There was a career day when I was growing up and there was a paramedic who came and spoke to us and I remember thinking, ‘that’s what I want to do,’” he said.

Watt grew up in Concord, Mass., and after marrying, moved to Lexington, Mass., but both towns didn’t have volunteer EMT corps.

“I was working full time and I had my son, too, so that took up my time,” she said. “But when my husband and I decided to move over the border to New Hampshire, one of the things that I wanted most was the opportunity to volunteer along those lines.”

It was fellow ambulance corpsperson Lisa Adams, also of Brookline, who convinced Watt to take the EMT course. Now an EMT Intermediate, Watt hopes to take paramedic training in July; she’s already been accepted into the program.

“This fits perfectly for me,” she said. “I can take calls, I can be here or if I’m on call, I don’t have to be here and sometimes I’ll come here or go directly to the scene.”

When she’s not volunteering, Watt owns a horse barn and runs a boarding business at her home.

“I realized that (Brookline) had a volunteer service and had set my eyes on that. When I joined in ’95, I knew it would be something that I would do for the rest of my life,” she said.

Watt was also quick to point out that Brookline, “is much luckier that other towns, as we’re one of a handful that has a corps of purely volunteers.”

Financially, Watt said, when there has been a budget and that budget is being pulled back, the paid staff is the first to go.

“And the town doesn’t know how to go about getting volunteers.

But in Brookline, we’ve been working on a volunteer basis for so long and migrated into a paid service, that when we had enough calls, the full time attendants had to be there, Watt said.

In Brookline, it’s the volunteers that provide the basic services on nights and weekends.

“It think it’s unfortunate that budgets have to be cut and critical services are put at risk- firefighters, and police officers and ambulance attendants alike,” Watt said.

“But I also think there is a huge opportunity when you have a town like Brookline that’s small – we’re not doing 2,000 calls a year; we’re doing 350 a year at most.”

Watt said Brookline is able to handle a volunteer effort and what it provides to the community.

“What we have is a perfect opportunity to show other people in town – not just the adults who might have time now that they’ve got the kids in and out of school, but show the kids that grow up in this town that you can provide a little service and be of real use to your local area.”