Western Standard - December 08, 2023


Alberta's Healthcare Issues

Trudeau may be down, but don't count him out yet Alberta Pension Plan engagement update

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

149.98

Word count

306

Sentence count

16

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
00:00:00.000 Like I said, AHS is a giant bureaucracy and necessarily treats people like they're human
00:00:06.260 resources, like they're cogs in a machine, like they're pawns. And, you know, that results in
00:00:14.600 up to, at one point during the pandemic, there was, I heard, up to 70% of full-time paramedics
00:00:21.580 off at any given time on stress leave. Now, you'll never see these numbers published. AHS
00:00:27.480 doesn't want to make them. What they will publish is that we hired more paramedics. And so now
00:00:32.120 staffing levels are up 11.2%. But when only half your ambulances are manned, despite your staffing
00:00:39.080 levels being at an all-time high, it tells a different story. And so what would happen is
00:00:45.840 you'd have half the ambulances on in Edmonton that you would normally have because these staff
00:00:50.360 are just burnt out from the system. And all the contract providers, the surrounding
00:00:56.460 fire department municipality services, we would spend most of our shift in Edmonton doing calls
00:01:03.980 downtown, dealing with drug addicts and marginalized people and all the calls that come with that big
00:01:11.040 city. But if you looked at it, the calls were getting responded to. Yes, there were code reds
00:01:17.980 where there were times where there weren't ambulances available. But had you not had those contract
00:01:24.020 providers around the metro area being sucked in, you would have seen very quickly what a catastrophe
00:01:31.380 those metro areas were in the terms of their state of healthcare. And then once you get to the hospital,
00:01:36.820 yes, we were being used as hallway nurses. That takes the load off an already stressed emerge. So we're 0.97
00:01:46.500 muddling through, you know, altogether, but we were never seeing very clearly where the system is failing,
00:01:53.140 right? You can become a Western standard member for just $10 a month or $99 a year for unlimited access.