CALGARY – Among additional hospital beds and funding to improve emergency rooms in Calgary and Edmonton, the province announced an expanded role for Alberta’s paramedics starting this summer. While front line workers are more than willing to take on additional duties, they say they’re already doing some of the tasks outlined Wednesday, and they need help.
“We know that paramedics have been doing a lot of what is being talked about already…so I’ve got my board of directors in right this minute, who are saying to me: ‘We’ve been doing community paramedicine for some time,’ and guess what? Recently we’ve cut funding for community paramedicine,” said Elisabeth Ballermann, president of Health Science Association of Alberta, the province’s union of healthcare professionals.
Under the new Health Professions Act, the province says the change will allow paramedics to provide more front-line care in clinics and regional hospitals, work with nurses, and administer services like portable lab analysis.
READ MORE: Province announces hundreds of beds, funding for emergency rooms
The Alberta Paramedic Association, the province’s professional organization, said in a statement the new changes will enable them to provide more services including counseling patients on accessing appropriate care, diagnosing and treating patients on scene and transporting patients to more appropriate locations besides emergency departments.
“Paramedics in Alberta have been working in non-traditional roles for some time and have achieved significant successes in areas such as palliative care, integration into rural Emergency Departments and Community Paramedic programs,” said the APA in a statement.
But Ballermann says her members are skeptical.
“We’ve been doing catheters on scene for some time in rural Alberta and they’ve taken the catheters off the trucks,” said Ballermann. “So our paramedics are quite skeptical.
“They know there’s potential for doing additional work for their scope of practice, but they need the support to both have enough bodies in place to do the work and to be supported in their education to do that sort of work.”
Ballermann said Alberta Health Services’ response to educational needs for paramedics has been “lukewarm at best and non-existent at worst.” She also expressed skepticism about whether Wednesday’s announcement would come to fruition.
During the province’s announcement, AHS CEO Vickie Kaminski was asked if there was any concern that expanding paramedics’ scope of practice would put additional strain on workers. She said EMS providers have told the province that they want to be able to “use the full scope of practice” and that it would “relieve some of the pressures” they’re seeing.
“This is not something that’s being imposed,” said Kaminski. “This is a response to the EMS people coming forward and saying ‘we can do a lot more, we need to be allowed to do this.’”
Alberta paramedic George Porter said he’s also skeptical of a positive change coming from the new changes to paramedic duties.
“One of their favorite things they say is we provide the right resources to the right patient at the right time with ambulances. That is not true; that is not happening. Is it every time? No, but it is happening often enough to be a grave concern to me and most of the EMS workers.”
Wait times have been an issue for years in Alberta. Last month, Alberta’s NDP released statistics taken from documents obtained through a Freedom of Information request showing emergency departments in Alberta have been dealing with an alarming number of overcapacity situations.
READ MORE: Overcapacity at emergency rooms in Edmonton alarming, say NDP
AHS says the plan to help relieve bottlenecks in emergency care will be fleshed out with more operational details in the next few months.
Wednesday’s announcement comes just two weeks before the provincial budget is set to be released. Mandel says the government is working to protect front line care even though it’s planning five per cent spending cuts across the board in the upcoming budget.
With files from Gary Bobrovitz, Emily Mertz and Karen Bartko
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