St. Albert’s third ambulance will remain permanently on city streets.
Alberta Health Services announced Friday morning the ambulance, operating under a pilot program since April, will remain stationed in the city.
When the Alberta government took over ambulance service from municipalities in 2009, the city was contracted to operate two ambulances in the community with more ambulances responding from surrounding communities when needed.
Under the old system, the ambulances were operated as part of a joint system with the fire department, which allowed the city to add third and even fourth vehicles when needed.
Not long after the changeover, the city began advocating for the third ambulance after concerns about response times started to emerge.
Mayor Nolan Crouse said he was very pleased to see the province make the pilot program permanent and he is glad the city pushed for it.
“They may not have looked at this if we hadn’t put the pressure on them politically and I am absolutely happy that they made this decision.”
Trevor Maslyk, AHS’s executive director for ambulance in Edmonton and northern Alberta, said the response times during the pilot program were largely unchanged.
Prior to the pilot, however, ambulances frequently were being brought in from other communities, and that dropped dramatically, supporting the continuation of the service.
“We saw a 50-per-cent decrease in the number of times that we saw the cross-coverage. That was really the crux.”
Maslyk said the permanent ambulance would be available for 12 hours a day when the city most needs the extra capacity.
“We found that, between the hours of about 7 a.m. and about 6 p.m., the requests for service peaked.”
The data during the pilot program showed that 50 per cent of the time an ambulance arrived within seven minutes, and 90 per cent of the time it arrived within 11 minutes.
Maslyk said that was only slightly better than it had been before the pilot program.
The city’s goal when it ran ambulance service was to have an ambulance respond within nine minutes 90 per cent of the time.
AHS has also promised the city it will provide full response time data in October.
Crouse said he is looking forward to that data so council can continue to track the issue.
“The good news is we have made this progress. The next news is we have the data and the data needs to verify that we are making an improvement.”
Crouse said he wants a good standard, but he is also concerned about the outliers and looking for ways to address them.
“The one thing that we are continuously concerned about is the people who fall outside that data the people who are in that 10 per cent,” he said. “We should be concerned about the 23-minute person, the 54-minute person, because that is when you have the high risk.”
Crouse said, while he is happy the pilot will be permanent, it is not the end of the program for him.
“I am going to stay on top of this absolutely, because this is too important.”
