The Edmonton region is consistently running lean on ambulance services and there are none available to respond to emergencies more often, according to new data from Alberta Health Services.
When there are no crews available to respond to 911 calls, the system goes into what is called a code red, or red alert.
Health Sciences Association of Alberta president Mike Parker said historically, code reds happened during mass disasters like the 1987 Black Friday tornado in Edmonton, the 2000 Pine Lake twister in central Alberta or the 2018 Humboldt Broncos bus crash in Saskatchewan.
But now, it’s a regular occurrence.
“In the 911 system for our paramedics in Alberta, we are at that level of call volume every single day. There are no available units. There are no paramedics to respond to your call,” Parker said on Monday.
Parker said some ambulance crews are running back-to-back 12-hour shifts with forced overtime on a daily basis. He added that 911 operators have been forced to hang up on those seeking medical help.
“They’re hanging up on you because they’ve got to get to the next call and they have no paramedics to dispatch to even send to your call. This is what the system in Alberta looks like today,” Parker said.
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Alberta Health Services confirmed red alerts are becoming more common in Calgary and Edmonton, which the health authority said are the only locations the data is tracked.
“The increase in red alerts is due to a continued high volume of 911 calls that average about 30 per cent above pre-pandemic call volumes,” AHS spokesperson Kerry Williamson said.
Data from AHS shows a sharp increase in code reds in Edmonton that started at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In January 2020, there were 18 red alerts that resulted in no ambulances for less than one hour in total.
Fast forward to January 2022, and there were 1,233 code reds with no crews available over nearly 40 hours in total. That was the worst month in the data released via a FOIP request (scroll down to see more.)
“We know that this has ripple effects outside of the City of Edmonton and for the first time, paramedics in Spruce Grove, Stony Plain, St Albert, Fort Saskatchewan and Sherwood Park have spent more time responding to calls in Edmonton than in their own communities,” said Opposition NDP health critic David Shepherd.
“The system has been run far too lean for far too long,” he added.
“We expected far too much from the paramedics we had in the system and we pushed them too far. Now we are starting to see the effects of that.”
Alberta Health said every province is being affected in much the same way. Ministry spokesperson Steve Buick said there’s no argument EMS response times have gotten longer since last summer and are too long in Edmonton.
Buick noted the AHS response time targets are eight minutes at median and 12 minutes at 90th percentile (the longest 10 per cent of responses). He said in June, the actual numbers were around eight minutes at median and 14 minutes at the 90th percentile.
“The times are much longer than they were two years ago and many responses do take too long, but the system is not ‘collapsing’ or anything of the kind,” said Buick.
He said the government will continue to support Edmonton EMS to get response times back down.
The province said it has funded nine new ambulances that were on the road as of the end of June: five in Edmonton and four in Calgary. Buick said there will be 11 more by the end of September.
The HSAA worries the frequency of code reds may become the norm unless Alberta makes even bigger changes.
“We can hire all the ambulances we want, but we run four or five empty shifts a week without paramedics in them.
“We don’t have people — so you want to get to the crux of this, we need to retain the folks that we have right now.”
Parker said making full-time shifts available to more workers and getting safe consumption sites back in place with wraparound services would help ease the burden.
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