St. Albert’s fire chief welcomed news of a provincial review into the centralization of ambulance dispatch centres because the system’s arrival in St. Albert has come with some significant challenges.
Provincial Health Minister Gene Zwozdesky announced a freeze on the centralization efforts on Tuesday, along with a review of the province’s efforts so far.
Zwozdesky said with half of the 35 dispatch centres already consolidated, it made sense to take a time-out.
“It never hurts to stop halfway and see where we are at.”
Since taking over ambulance service from municipalities, the province has been slowly consolidating dispatch centres. Eventually the province aims to have just three centres — one in Edmonton, one in Calgary, and one in Peace River — cover all of Alberta.
Zwozdesky said the review should take a few weeks or months and the province still could meet its target of just three centres on its original schedule.
He said he was hearing requests from first responders and municipalities and saw no problem with taking a step back to review their progress.
“This is a honest response to a honest series of questions that were asked of us.”
Zwozdesky said for now the plan is to move forward, but he wants to see what the review finds and stressed that none of the dispatch centres that were consolidated would be reopened.
The St. Albert dispatch centre closed February 8 with the responsibilities being transferred to a centre in Strathcona County, with everything eventually being moved to Edmonton.
St. Albert Fire Chief Ray Richards said since the dispatch has moved, there have been a number of hiccups.
“We are experiencing some issues. We are working through them and we have built some systems in there to protect the safety of St. Albert residents.”
Richards said the dispatchers have often sent an ambulance on one side of the city to the other side. Before, the city sent the ambulance from the closest centre.
The city no longer has access to response time data, but Richards assumes this is having an impact on how quickly ambulances arrive.
“It is reasonable to assume that if they are travelling outside their districts they are travelling further.”
The St. Albert ambulance system works under contract to the province, providing two ambulances. When those two are in service dispatchers are supposed to send another into the city from Edmonton.
Richards said in some cases that did not happen and the city has been without an ambulance.
“We have had at least six different occurrences, in just over a month, when somehow, our two ambulances are gone and they are not sending that backup ambulance into the city.”
He said the city’s own dispatchers tended to be more quick in making sure a third ambulance was sent in.
“We managed it perhaps a little bit more aggressively when we were dispatching our own. Dispatchers were making sure that the third ambulance was getting moved out here quickly.”
He said on more serious calls, the ambulance dispatchers usually send a fire crew as well to act as backup and that also hasn’t happened.
“On the more serious calls, say a heart attack, two people are needed to properly look after that person, so we will send out a fire assist and one of them will drive the ambulance to the hospital.”
He said local landmarks like Seven Hills or stores that outside dispatchers might not be familiar with have also posed problems, though not as significant as they feared.
