Province announces plans to lower EMS response times

The province listed out some measures being put in place that were identified by frontline workers, municipalities, and other EMS partners. These include:

Adding 20 more ambulances during peak hours. This measure is expected to roll out in the spring in Calgary and Edmonton. Each city will receive 10 new ambulances this year, which is on top of the 19 ambulances that were added in both cities during peak hours in 2022.
Fast-tracking ambulance transfers at emergency departments by moving less urgent patients to hospital waiting areas, based on new provincial guidelines now in place.
Freeing up paramedics by contracting appropriately trained resources for non-emergency transfers between facilities in Edmonton and Calgary.
Empowering paramedics to assess a patient’s condition on scene and decide whether they need to be taken to an ER by ambulance.

Interim president and CEO of Alberta Health Services (AHS), Mauro Chies said, “The work underway is key to ensuring that patients requiring care from emergency medical services get that care; while we improve the efficiency of EMS patient flow, both within EMS and across the emergency department/acute care environment.”

Dr. John Cowell, official administrator for AHS, said the work by the province supports four priority areas that the organization is focused on.

These areas include improving EMS response times, decreasing emergency department wait times, reducing wait times for surgeries, and improving patient flow across the health care system.

DISPATCH REVIEW

A review of Alberta’s central dispatch model by PricewaterhouseCoopers found that the model “follows world-leading practices and design”.

According to the report, increased demand on EMS services are the leading cause of longer wait times, which the province notes have put pressure on the availability of ambulances.

The review found that the current centralized model and current call-taking process do not impact ambulance wait times. The report did indicate 45 recommendations and areas of improvement.

NEW AHS POLICY

AHS has implemented a new policy, in effect at all hospitals province-wide. It provides direction and guidelines to streamline the transfer of stable and less urgent patients from the care of paramedics to emergency department and urgent care centre teams.

The province said the new policy will allow for EMS crews to respond quicker to more 911 calls and spend less time waiting in emergency rooms.

Staff at emergency departments will assess patients arriving in ambulances based on the new criteria to determine if they are eligible to stay in the waiting area with other stable patients.

NON-EMERGENCY TRANSFERS BETWEEN FACILITIES

In the weeks ahead, AHS will issue a request for proposals for non-emergency transfers between hospitals and care centres in the Calgary and Edmonton areas.

Officials note this change will free up ambulances and AHS paramedics from roughly 44,000 non-emergency transfers per year and will improve response times for urgent calls.

This comes in addition to introducing a new program for non-clinical transports for patients discharged from a facility or acute care.

David Shepherd, Alberta NDP Health Critic, issued the following statement in response to today’s report on EMS:

“This long-delayed report by the UCP on the profound crisis they created in our ambulance and emergency healthcare systems is too little, too late.

“Once again, the UCP is ignoring requests from paramedics themselves to get crews off-shift on time, offer all paramedics a permanent full-time contract, and expand harm reduction services to cut down the huge number of drug poisoning calls.

“The fact that the solutions called for by paramedics are not included in this report is a serious failure by this government, and it’s frustrating to see a task force spend a year coming up with a recommendation to form another task force, this time for emergency departments.

“Thousands of EMS shifts every month are going unfilled in the Edmonton area alone, but there is no real action in this report to address recruitment.

“As they have many times before, this government has released a report that is thin on action when they should be taking immediate action to solve this crisis. Albertans cannot have any confidence that the UCP will implement these recommendations.

“We cannot allow the UCP government to use this current crisis in EMS as another excuse to justify their agenda of privatized health care,” said Chris Gallaway, Executive Director of Friends of Medicare. “Every dollar of public health care money should be going into bolstering the public EMS system and protecting the health and safety of patients and paramedics, not used to line the pockets of private, for-profit contractors.”

“We are in an urgent staffing situation that requires urgent action, with a workforce plan to deal with widespread short-staffing and worker burnout, and closures impacting EMS, emergency departments and our entire public health care system,” said Gallaway. “Empty platitudes about retention from this government are nothing without action. We need a real and meaningful plan to retain the skilled workers we have, including giving full-time contracts with job security to paramedics who want it.”

by Justin Goulet/LethbridgeNewsNOW

Province announces plans to lower EMS response times

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