It’s a term that became popular during former Premier Ralph Klein’s era, the era of serious cuts to service: downloading. In essence, it means the provincial government is shirking its responsibilities, whether intended or not, and handing them to municipalities.
Gazette readers may have been concerned to read this week that ambulance response times in the city in the second quarter of 2014 are in the 14 minute range, up from nine, a number the local fire chief Ray Richards says is an informal target for fire and ambulance response.
So what’s going on? Well, it involves Alberta Health Services (AHS) and the absorption of ambulance service into the provincial bureaucracy. AHS took over ambulance service several years ago from municipalities, and Richards told the Gazette response times are not meeting the level before centralization.
That’s because St. Albert ambulances are leaving the city to respond to emergency calls from other communities, and this isn’t unique to St. Albert. This is occurring all over Alberta. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that larger areas such as Edmonton mathematically always have a greater chance of emergency calls than a smaller area such as St. Albert. Hence, the city acts as a whirlpool, drawing in services from the surrounding area. That means the surrounding area has to wait for its own service or rely on firefighters to respond to medical emergencies. Not all firefighters have the same medical training paramedics have.
However, St. Albert does have a few advantages that other Alberta communities don't. One, St. Albert’s fire department has quite a few firefighters trained as paramedics. Second, the city has a contract to run ambulance service on behalf of AHS.
But the dispatch problem remains, and it will remain as long as centralized or “borderless” dispatch, as AHS likes to call it, remains.
The provincial government, through AHS, wanted ambulance service back under its umbrella, which does make sense. However, it’s obvious with response times approaching 50 per cent higher than targeted, “borderless dispatch” isn’t working properly. Large centres seem to be getting the service, while smaller areas wait in line. To compound the problem, municipalities such as St. Albert are pondering more resources in an effort to respond to the problem.
This is wrong. Taxpayers are already sending revenue to Edmonton to fund ambulance services through AHS, now they’re possibly going to have to send more tax money to the city of St. Albert to ensure ambulance services are functioning properly.
The province needs to improve ambulance response times and stop downloading hidden costs to municipalities. If ambulances now belong to the provincial government and AHS, then those bureaucracies need to start acting like it.
