Red Deer Mayor Tara Veer (top left), Wood Buffalo Mayor Don Scott (bottom left), Lethbridge Mayor Chris Spearman (top right) and Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi (bottom right) held a joint virtual news conference Monday afternoon.

By Josh Hall (Twitter: @Vancan19)

dispatch went dark for an hour last Tues

Mayors want immediate investigation into EMS dispatch outage

Feb 1, 2021 | 3:05 PM

RED DEER– Four Alberta mayors are demanding an immediate third-party review of EMS dispatch consolidation, as well as an inquiry into a 72-minute long technical outage last week at the AHS South Communication Centre.

Mayors Tara Veer, Naheed Nenshi, Chris Spearman and Don Scott, representing Red Deer, Calgary, Lethbridge and Wood Buffalo, held a joint news conference Monday to share details of the outage which they say lasted from 10:30-11:42 p.m. on Jan. 26.

Veer said that during the outage, AHS was dispatching ambulances manually, had no access to Computer-Aided Dispatch (CAD), mobile data terminals GPS tracking of ambulances, or to ambulance mobile phone numbers.

In a letter to Premier Jason Kenney and Health Minister Tyler Shandro, the mayors outline errors and delays that they were assured by Shandro over several months would not occur once consolidation took effect Jan. 12.

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Since transition, the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo (RMWB)’s emergency services staff have had to directly intervene in about 20 per cent of medical calls to prevent AHS-caused delays, Scott said.

One caller in RMWB called 911 requiring an ambulance was transferred three times and had to repeat his address six times, resulting in a four-minute delay.

In another case, an AHS dispatcher sent a medical first response to the wrong fire dispatch centre in Calgary, which should’ve been forwarded to Red Deer’s dispatch centre. That caused a three-minute delay.

Following months of advocacy on the matter, the four municipalities offered in December to pay for the entire cost of maintaining an integrated system.

Veer said the offers still stands, but says they still haven’t received a formal response from the premier.

“I did speak with the premier’s principal secretary a couple weeks ago and indicated that we are willing to go to the wall because we believe in integrated dispatch that strongly,” she said Monday. “I indicated to the secretary that I expected a response from the premier, and that it was insufficient for that offer to be delegated to the minister of health.”

Veer said Shandro shouldn’t be the one to handle the offer because he’d clearly already made up his mind to not overturn the AHS decision to consolidate dispatch.

Calling it a calamity, Scott added that they did get a response from Shandro, but that it essentially said ‘thanks, but no thanks, and the decision is final.’

“AHS and the government spends too much time defending the decision instead of addressing the real issue,” he suggested. “The best AHS has done through this entire process is point the finger back and say you guys should be doing better.”

The mayors also claim AHS did not communicate with the South Communication Centre during the outage and still hasn’t provided an update.

AHS held a media call this afternoon to respond to the mayors’ claims.

Chief Paramedic Darren Sandbeck called their comments inaccurate and said there is zero evidence that consolidation has caused adverse events, delays or negative outcomes.

He also said that the outage lasted only 42 minutes, not 72.

The City of Red Deer tells rdnewsNOW that 72 minutes is how long they understood the system to be entirely or partially blacked out.

“AHS EMS has been successfully dispatching ambulances for more than two-thirds of the province for the last decade. We have seen nothing over the last few weeks to suggest that has changed,” said Sandbeck.

“As a paramedic for 40 years serving Albertans, I find it extremely disappointing that people would claim we are doing something not in the best interest of our patients.”

Sandbeck addressed several of the specific scenarios the mayors talked about, refuting any notion they had something to do with consolidation.

Said Sandbeck: “911 calls are handled in exactly the same way today as they were prior to the transition of dispatch services to AHS.”

rdnewsNOW has also reached out to the Premier’s Office for comment.