Western Standard - May 18, 2023


MORGAN： 'Premier Smith's EMS policy showing remarkable success.'

Topics
EMS policy success in Alberta
Mentioned
Danielle Smith David Shippers Legacy Media
Cory Morgan Show. Premier Smith’s successes go nearly unreported Alberta leaders debate 2023

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

189.51

Word count

901

Sentence count

54

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

As recently as last fall, Albertans were dying, literally dying, while waiting for an ambulance to arrive. Now, thanks to the government of the United Conservative Party of Alberta, ambulance response times have dropped dramatically, and in a few months, they have actually improved.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 So last weekend, we had some healthcare statistics quietly released with a little fanfare.
00:00:04.660 You know, when they drop it on the weekend, they're not really looking for people to pay
00:00:07.200 much attention to it.
00:00:08.800 And today, Legacy Media, of course, has already forgotten those statistics, and it's a pity
00:00:12.460 because the dramatic improvement in waiting times for ambulances due to new policies implemented
00:00:17.680 by the UCP should be making headlines right now.
00:00:20.900 As recently as last fall, Albertans were dying, literally dying while waiting for ambulance
00:00:25.660 services.
00:00:26.020 One of the worst cases was an elderly woman who bled out after a dog attack just minutes
00:00:31.080 away from Calgary's largest hospital.
00:00:33.800 She had to wait 40 minutes for an ambulance to arrive.
00:00:36.700 We had red alert periods in Calgary and Edmonton where there were no ambulances available at
00:00:40.640 all.
00:00:41.000 It was commonplace.
00:00:42.660 Meanwhile, rural ambulances would get pulled into urban centers, and then rural firefighters
00:00:47.160 and police officers had to take on paramedic rolls as they desperately tried to transport
00:00:51.380 injured people to hospitals.
00:00:52.620 Now, paramedics and citizens have been raising concerns about this issue for years.
00:00:57.560 We've had multiple governments paying lip service to the problem, but none have done
00:01:00.980 really anything aside from tossing more money at the issue, and it didn't have much effect.
00:01:05.380 Until now.
00:01:07.040 Daniel Smith raised the EMS crisis as an issue while running for the UCP leadership, and she
00:01:11.560 promised to act upon it when she became premier.
00:01:13.580 Well, last December, the Smith government announced changes that were going to be made
00:01:18.580 to improve EMS response times.
00:01:20.320 To begin with, vans were going to be equipped and contracted for use in non-emergency transfers
00:01:24.680 of patients.
00:01:25.780 Ambulances and trained paramedic teams have been doing that for up to 75 trips a day when
00:01:29.960 they weren't really in need of emergency services, these transports.
00:01:32.940 Meanwhile, of course, emergencies are happening.
00:01:35.000 The NDP predictably responded with hysterics and accused Smith of wanting to harm patients
00:01:39.620 by using Ubers instead of ambulances.
00:01:41.860 In those cases, despite the hyperbole from the NDP, Uber actually is often a more appropriate
00:01:46.720 option than a fully equipped ambulance for a non-emergency patient transfer.
00:01:51.080 Smith also vowed to increase physicians, nurses, and other resources for triage in emergency
00:01:55.900 rooms to reduce the time paramedics are stuck doing hallway care because the hospitals weren't 0.84
00:02:00.860 admitting the patients being dropped off.
00:02:02.840 And we've had at times as many as 20 ambulances piled up outside of hospitals as paramedics can't
00:02:07.360 find hospital staff willing to take the patient.
00:02:10.340 NDP health critic David Shepard panned the plan saying, I can't see this announcement
00:02:14.380 being anything but an incredible disappointment to Alberta's paramedics and frontline health
00:02:19.160 care workers.
00:02:20.660 And the UCP government also started to set timelines for emergency rooms to take patients.
00:02:24.560 Then again, the NDP accused the government of forcing paramedics to dump and run with patients,
00:02:29.320 which was utterly untrue.
00:02:30.880 Hospitals were expected to admit patients from ambulances in less than 40 minutes.
00:02:34.920 That's not an unreasonable request.
00:02:36.660 So now it's been a few months and the numbers are in and they look fantastic.
00:02:41.540 In November of 2022, so just last November, Alberta, well, Calgary was in a state of EMS
00:02:47.300 red alert for 4.2 hours.
00:02:49.640 In one month, 4.2 hours, the city of Calgary, 1.4 million people had no ambulances.
00:02:54.440 Last April, that number was down to four minutes.
00:02:57.800 Four minutes, that was it.
00:02:59.320 That's quite a reduction.
00:03:01.240 Ambulance response times last November, they averaged 22 minutes in urban areas and 64
00:03:06.300 minutes in rural zones.
00:03:07.420 That's a pretty long time if you're in serious, serious condition.
00:03:10.040 Well, last April, those response times had dropped to 12 minutes in urban areas and 40 in rural
00:03:15.740 areas.
00:03:16.600 This is life-saving, folks.
00:03:18.200 And the silence on this success is deafening.
00:03:20.800 There's no doubt about this.
00:03:22.080 Lives are going to be saved thanks to the changes made by the UCP to EMS policies.
00:03:26.460 We should be shouting this from the rooftops and examining more common sense approaches to
00:03:30.800 health care bottlenecks in the system.
00:03:32.920 Unfortunately, partisan loathing of Daniel Smith has rendered the establishment and legacy media
00:03:38.080 outlets incapable of crediting Smith with doing something right.
00:03:41.840 The bloated Alberta Health Services bureaucracy has created an inefficient health care system
00:03:46.300 incapable of embracing change or innovation in care.
00:03:49.860 And in firing the inept board of the health services and forcing common sense solutions to
00:03:54.520 the problems, Smith's actually managed to bring about quick success with a crisis that
00:03:58.540 hadn't seen improvement in over a decade.
00:04:01.300 Now, Smith is taking a strong no-nonsense approach with taking on the addiction epidemic as well.
00:04:06.180 She's surrounding herself with treatment specialists and recovered addicts rather than listening
00:04:10.500 to the usual suspects in the establishment who insist on further enablement policies.
00:04:14.980 Enablement policies for addicts have failed and they're failing throughout North America.
00:04:18.780 Overdoses are continuing to climb while the number of addicted people keeps growing.
00:04:22.600 We need results-based policy rather than aspirational ideological PAP.
00:04:27.280 Smith seems to be willing to cut through the BS and impose policies that work rather than pursuing
00:04:31.680 policies that feel good.
00:04:32.980 If Smith loses the election due to an establishment that refuses to accept positive changes, the
00:04:38.640 health care system and the addicts in need of treatment will all suffer for it.
00:04:42.000 If we can't credit a success, we're never going to see more of it.