Western Standard - June 07, 2022


CORY'S RANT： AHS has no excuse for a woman dying waiting for an ambulance


Episode Stats

Length

3 minutes

Words per Minute

201.28607

Word Count

793

Sentence Count

48

Misogynist Sentences

3


Summary

A woman in her 80s bled to death while waiting over half an hour for an ambulance in Calgary. Bystanders waited helplessly as a woman slowly faded away in front of them, and the minutes ticked away since calling 911.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 EMS personnel have been raising the alarm bells for years on the crisis within emergency medical services.
00:00:06.300 Here at The Standard, we've written a number of stories in columns exposing the extended and growing wait times for ambulance services across this province.
00:00:14.160 The Health Sciences Association of Alberta has been posting daily red alerts in Alberta cities as areas find themselves with no ambulance services available.
00:00:23.040 So, of course, what's finally happened, a woman in her 80s has bled to death while waiting over half an hour for ambulance services in Calgary.
00:00:31.300 She was a mere four kilometers from the largest hospital in Alberta.
00:00:36.480 According to Google Maps, it would have taken less than 10 minutes to drive her to that hospital in a car.
00:00:41.200 An ambulance, presumably, would be faster.
00:00:44.680 And speaking to a paramedic in Calgary familiar with the incident, he's heard that this death would almost certainly have been prevented had there been timely trained medical intervention.
00:00:53.600 Bystanders waited helplessly as a woman slowly faded away in front of them and the minutes ticked away since calling 911.
00:01:00.980 The problems plaguing Alberta's emergency medical services under AHS management are many.
00:01:05.640 There's a lot of factors.
00:01:07.040 The big one yesterday, though, the largest contributing factor to the death of that woman in Capitol Hill, Calgary, was the usage of paramedics for hallway care in hospitals.
00:01:15.240 At any given time in a large Alberta hospital, you'll see half a dozen or more ambulances parked in and around the emergency area.
00:01:22.540 If you go into the hospital, you'll see upwards of a dozen or more paramedics hanging around caring for non-critical patients in the hallways and waiting rooms of the facility.
00:01:30.800 They're not allowed to leave until hospital staff sign off on a patient.
00:01:34.560 So they're trapped there.
00:01:35.820 And hospital staff find it easier upon themselves, of course, not to sign off quickly so they can dump the care upon the paramedics.
00:01:42.280 This leaves paramedics stranded while cities run out of available ambulances.
00:01:46.840 With AHS now running the entire show, it's centralized.
00:01:50.740 And it wasn't that way in the past.
00:01:52.520 They cower in terror, of course, of public service unions.
00:01:54.960 They don't want to raise the ire of the nurses' union by taking away the hallway care given by paramedics.
00:02:00.320 So they look the other way, despite the paramedics' union calling foul for years.
00:02:03.760 The bigger union wins in the end, and citizens are the ones paying the ultimate price.
00:02:08.340 Had paramedics been allowed to leave Foothills Hospital last Sunday,
00:02:11.000 they likely would have arrived to the scene where that senior was dying and gotten her back to advanced care in time to save her life.
00:02:17.660 Instead, I imagine they were sitting helplessly in a hospital, watching patients with non-life-threatening conditions.
00:02:23.580 The dispatch service can carry some of the blame here as well.
00:02:27.040 In case you were wondering, if you didn't know, if you call 911,
00:02:30.660 the operator is not allowed to tell you how long it's going to be until emergency services arrive.
00:02:35.960 You can ask and ask.
00:02:36.720 They won't tell you.
00:02:38.160 This has been a problem all over the system.
00:02:39.640 A case in Okotoks led to firefighters staying on the scene of a serious injury,
00:02:43.560 waiting for nearly an hour for an ambulance.
00:02:45.940 At emergency, services simply told the firefighters how long it would be
00:02:48.980 they could have transferred the patients themselves.
00:02:51.520 Instead, the person's life was put at risk,
00:02:53.780 and trained firefighters were unavailable to respond to any fires that might break out.
00:02:57.780 All they needed was to be told.
00:02:59.480 Time is everything in emergencies, whether medical or with fires.
00:03:02.760 The longer one waits for trained responders, the higher the chance of a negative outcome.
00:03:06.380 This is common sense, but that's always lacking when it comes to big bureaucracies.
00:03:10.800 Had bystanders attending to the dying senior known it would take over half an hour to get an ambulance,
00:03:15.480 they may have chosen to drive the woman themselves.
00:03:18.400 Or, with enough fit people, they could have carried her to the emergency room in less than half an hour from that location.
00:03:24.940 Hell, they would have been better off calling an Uber.
00:03:27.500 At least ride-sharing apps will let you know how far the car is away from you.
00:03:31.180 Uber does a better job than our bloody ambulance system.
00:03:34.580 All we can do now is hope that this tragedy acts as a wake-up call.
00:03:38.540 AHS has ignored every other alarm to date.
00:03:41.400 So, it's hard to tell if the needless death of a local senior will be enough to make them take action.
00:03:49.240 Unless things change dramatically, though, and soon,
00:03:52.340 it won't be a matter of if another person dies waiting for an ambulance.
00:03:55.260 It's going to be a matter of when.