Alberta's Healthcare Issues
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
149.9755
Summary
In the wake of the pandemic, paramedics and first responders were overwhelmed with the number of calls they were responding to. Emergency medicine was out of control. Paramedics were on the brink of burnout, and couldn t keep up with the demands of responding to the growing number of emergency medicine calls across the country.
Transcript
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Like I said, AHS is a giant bureaucracy and necessarily treats people like they're human
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resources, like they're cogs in a machine, like they're pawns. And, you know, that results in
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up to, at one point during the pandemic, there was, I heard, up to 70% of full-time paramedics
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off at any given time on stress leave. Now, you'll never see these numbers published. AHS
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doesn't want to make them. What they will publish is that we hired more paramedics. And so now
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staffing levels are up 11.2%. But when only half your ambulances are manned, despite your staffing
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levels being at an all-time high, it tells a different story. And so what would happen is
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you'd have half the ambulances on in Edmonton that you would normally have because these staff
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are just burnt out from the system. And all the contract providers, the surrounding
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fire department municipality services, we would spend most of our shift in Edmonton doing calls
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downtown, dealing with drug addicts and marginalized people and all the calls that come with that big
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city. But if you looked at it, the calls were getting responded to. Yes, there were code reds
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where there were times where there weren't ambulances available. But had you not had those contract
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providers around the metro area being sucked in, you would have seen very quickly what a catastrophe
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those metro areas were in the terms of their state of healthcare. And then once you get to the hospital,
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yes, we were being used as hallway nurses. That takes the load off an already stressed emerge. So we're
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muddling through, you know, altogether, but we were never seeing very clearly where the system is failing,
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