Rural North Idaho volunteer EMS service temporarily exempt from 24-hour response requirement

The volunteer J-K Ambulance service serves a 4,000 square mile response area home to roughly 1,000 people. (Matt Gush/Getty Images)

In a rare move, Idaho health officials granted a rural north central Idaho volunteer ambulance service a waiver to a 24-hour response requirement in Idaho law.

The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare board on Thursday unanimously approved the waiver for Kendrick and Juliaetta’s J-K Ambulance service for seven months.

Amid recent wildfires and staffing shortages in the service of a handful of volunteers, J-K Ambulance has “fallen into a situation” of being unable to meet the requirement, Idaho Bureau of Emergency Medical Services & Preparedness Chief Wayne Denny told the state health board.

Denny said he sought the waiver at the request of J-K Ambulance. In his written request for the waiver, Denny told the board that staffing was so stretched thin that enforcing the legal, round-the-clock ambulance response requirement “would likely lead to the abandonment of the service.”

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Challenges with staffing rural Idaho EMS services

The volunteer ambulance service serves a 4,000 square mile response area home to roughly 1,000 people, Denny wrote. It has four volunteer licensed EMS personnel, and one to two volunteer drivers, leaving it with “very limited operations during daytime weekday hours with little to no reserves,” Denny wrote.

“The challenges with rural EMS that we talk about on a fairly regular basis is alive and well here in the J-K community,” Denny told the state health board. “The situation that they’ve got is the providers that they have on staff can do a great job of responding in the evenings and weekends. It’s really during the work day, when folks are at work, that they have a hard time getting the ambulance staffed.”

Denny told the state board it was his third time — in 20 years at the state EMS bureau — that he’s seen an ambulance services waiver request. Officials usually try to prevent asking for a waiver by getting ahead of the problem, for instance, through recruitment efforts, he said.

“It is a reality that you can have a small volunteer service like this, that really relies on one or two people that can provide that service during the day. And when they retire, then we’re in a challenging situation,” he said. “And that’s where we find ourselves now with J-K. We’ll get through it, but … they’re just going to need some time.”

Neighboring fire departments and volunteer ambulance crews have agreed to help cover J-K Ambulance’s response area, according to Denny’s request for the waiver. But the closest ambulance services in Deary and Troy are also rural, volunteer services “with similar challenges,” he wrote. The larger towns of Lewiston and Moscow are about 40 minutes away from J-K Ambulance’s response area, “so they are a second choice,” Denny wrote. Moscow also has a volunteer EMS service.

In March 2025, the state health board plans to review progress and whether the waiver should be lifted.

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