What can be commented on this situation except everything in Canada is becoming multi-tiered & in the next few decades, we will see multi-tiered society, like the ones exist in developing countries, taking root in developed countries. There will be one service available for the public, which, of course, will be horrible (public healthcare, public education etc) & one for the private, where people, who can afford it, will pay for best of the best services.
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Last month, a group of anonymous Alberta medics began using the handle @StatusCodeRed to tweet records of lengthy response times, & instances of Code Red—that is, when no ambulances are available in a certain area—that often spanned entire city regions (including Calgary & Edmonton) & lasted several hours. For a time on Jan. 28, according to one tweet, there wasn’t a single ambulance available between Calgary & Lethbridge, a 200-km stretch. “I think AHS [Alberta Health Services] realizes,” Neil Wilson [Nanton's local reeve] says, “that we in the smaller communities are on the verge of revolution if they don’t do something pretty soon.”
George Porter, a paramedic who has worked in southern Alberta for more than 40 years, has experienced the problems first-hand. Over the past five years, he’s responded to multiple critical emergency calls that took up to an hour to reach. The cycle became familiar: Hospitals, which no longer had to foot the bill for ambulance transfers once AHS was introduced, began calling teams such as Porter’s to ferry rural patients into the city, although they were often healthy enough to take a taxi, a much cheaper option.
Darren Sandbeck, the AHS’s chief paramedic, says stories like Porter’s—& those shared anonymously on social media—are troubling, but are exceptions to the rule. AHS records show that 90% of response times province-wide are under 12 minutes (in line with other provinces). To reduce the response times of the remaining 10%, AHS is introducing non-ambulance transport vehicles & piloting “rapid transfer units”—multi-bed overflow rooms in a pair of Edmonton hospitals that have shown signs of early success. In March, Sandbeck will begin a tour of the province to “engage front-line staff in a conversation that will help us to hear their concerns & ideas for improving the system.”
Alberta’s problems, however, are hardly exclusive, says Chris Hood, president of the Ottawa-based Paramedic Association of Canada. “Across the country, we see extraordinary stories where people are experiencing long wait times . . . & paramedics waiting to off-load patients from their cots because there’s no available bed for them in the hospital,” he says. “These issues are not specific to EMS; they’re specific to health care.” He says Alberta’s circumstances are particularly severe, because the province is still tackling the transition (even 5 years on) to a provincial system, much as New Brunswick did in 2007, when it amalgamated 52 separate ambulance services. But the province is nonetheless an example of a national ailment—an underfunded & overburdened system—& “the people suffering are the patients.”
But Porter, the veteran paramedic, is worried his province will see more suffering before it makes any real changes. “It’s like a dangerous intersection,” he says. “The police, the firefighters, the medics, the residents all complain. They say they’ll send it to committee, that there’s no money in the budget. Then somebody’s kid gets killed &, within hours, there’s a crosswalks, lights, a crossing guard, everything. Why do we have to wait until that happens?”
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Last month, a group of anonymous Alberta medics began using the handle @StatusCodeRed to tweet records of lengthy response times, & instances of Code Red—that is, when no ambulances are available in a certain area—that often spanned entire city regions (including Calgary & Edmonton) & lasted several hours. For a time on Jan. 28, according to one tweet, there wasn’t a single ambulance available between Calgary & Lethbridge, a 200-km stretch. “I think AHS [Alberta Health Services] realizes,” Neil Wilson [Nanton's local reeve] says, “that we in the smaller communities are on the verge of revolution if they don’t do something pretty soon.”
George Porter, a paramedic who has worked in southern Alberta for more than 40 years, has experienced the problems first-hand. Over the past five years, he’s responded to multiple critical emergency calls that took up to an hour to reach. The cycle became familiar: Hospitals, which no longer had to foot the bill for ambulance transfers once AHS was introduced, began calling teams such as Porter’s to ferry rural patients into the city, although they were often healthy enough to take a taxi, a much cheaper option.
Darren Sandbeck, the AHS’s chief paramedic, says stories like Porter’s—& those shared anonymously on social media—are troubling, but are exceptions to the rule. AHS records show that 90% of response times province-wide are under 12 minutes (in line with other provinces). To reduce the response times of the remaining 10%, AHS is introducing non-ambulance transport vehicles & piloting “rapid transfer units”—multi-bed overflow rooms in a pair of Edmonton hospitals that have shown signs of early success. In March, Sandbeck will begin a tour of the province to “engage front-line staff in a conversation that will help us to hear their concerns & ideas for improving the system.”
Alberta’s problems, however, are hardly exclusive, says Chris Hood, president of the Ottawa-based Paramedic Association of Canada. “Across the country, we see extraordinary stories where people are experiencing long wait times . . . & paramedics waiting to off-load patients from their cots because there’s no available bed for them in the hospital,” he says. “These issues are not specific to EMS; they’re specific to health care.” He says Alberta’s circumstances are particularly severe, because the province is still tackling the transition (even 5 years on) to a provincial system, much as New Brunswick did in 2007, when it amalgamated 52 separate ambulance services. But the province is nonetheless an example of a national ailment—an underfunded & overburdened system—& “the people suffering are the patients.”
But Porter, the veteran paramedic, is worried his province will see more suffering before it makes any real changes. “It’s like a dangerous intersection,” he says. “The police, the firefighters, the medics, the residents all complain. They say they’ll send it to committee, that there’s no money in the budget. Then somebody’s kid gets killed &, within hours, there’s a crosswalks, lights, a crossing guard, everything. Why do we have to wait until that happens?”
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