It should be a fairly simple question to answer: Is there a third ambulance to service St. Albert?
Alberta Health Services says yes, it’s stationed at the Sturgeon Community Hospital between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. If that’s the case, say city officials, then why does it seem that every time St. Albert needs a third ambulance, it’s not available?
Show us the proof, the city says. Provide statistics that show when this ambulance is in the city, what calls it answers, what its response times are and where it’s being sent.
Sorry, say AHS officials, we can’t provide those statistics. What AHS says is the ambulance comes in each day from Morinville and returns there in the evening. But don’t ask us to prove it with statistics.
Very strange. Let’s assume this third ambulance is, as AHS says, stationed out of the Sturgeon hospital every day. If it’s rarely available to respond to St. Albert emergencies, then where is it?
If it’s spending much of its time back out in Morinville or servicing the region, then it can hardly be called the third St. Albert ambulance that AHS promised back in September.
This has become an issue because the response time for ambulances in St. Albert has risen from nine minutes 90 per cent of the time to 15 minutes. Now six minutes may not seem like a long time, unless you’re the person having just suffered a heart attack or cerebral aneurysm or some other life-threatening incident.
We keep hearing stories of people waiting 30 minutes or more for an ambulance to arrive. That’s simply unacceptable. And it’s frustrating for Emergency Medical Services crews. In a survey of Edmonton EMS personnel conducted by their union, many said service is unacceptable.
“This system is on the edge of failure on a daily basis,” one wrote.
“I honestly hope no one in my family ever needs an ambulance,” wrote another.
Many people will point to the decision to bring emergency medical responders under the umbrella of Alberta Health Services in 2009 as the reason for today’s problems. But the problem begins in the overstrained emergency departments of hospitals. EMS crews tell of having to wait for hours to drop off patients because the emergency rooms are overcrowded, rendering these crews unavailable to answer other 911 calls.
Partly because of that, St. Albert is experiencing code red — when there is no ambulance available to answer a call — sometimes three or four times a day. That situation is even worse in Edmonton, resulting in St. Albert’s ambulances being dispatched into Edmonton, leaving us to have calls answered by fire trucks, which can get medical staff to the patient but can’t transport them to hospital.
The point is, AHS says there is a third ambulance to service St. Albert. If that’s true then provide the statistics to prove it. One has to wonder why AHS is so reluctant to release these statistics. Not just in St. Albert, but elsewhere.
Maybe Alberta Liberal health critic David Swann is right when he says response times have gotten so bad they’re not even being reported anymore. That is a scary thought.
