Western Standard - April 22, 2024


Rethinking EMS Systems for Improved Care

Topics
private contractors frustration
Mentioned
Aaron Paramedical Danielle Smith Canning
Southern Alberta Prepares for Drought Emergency The Indian Reserve system must be dismantled

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

187.19

Word count

524

Sentence count

41

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, I sit down with EMS Minister Danielle Smith to discuss EMS in Alberta. EMS is a critical part of Alberta's health care system, but it's been left out of touch with what it should be doing. We talk about why this is happening and what can be done about it.

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 You would think that EMS by itself would be easy to fix, but it's so intertwined with the rest of health care now, not the way it used to be.
00:00:10.900 So we have some real struggles right now that we're dealing with.
00:00:14.400 Yeah, well, so we've been talking for a while.
00:00:16.280 We have a more receptive Premier than we've had for quite some time.
00:00:18.780 Even Premier Canning was a bit receptive on some of this.
00:00:21.260 That's why I say with EMS, there's some good common sense solutions.
00:00:23.720 You know, you've been pointing out, others have been pointing out, we're using a lot of ambulances to transport patients that just don't need to be used in that sense when it should be an emergency use.
00:00:34.140 Or they've been draining from rural populations, you know, taking the rural ambulances into the cities and leaving other areas under cupboard.
00:00:41.920 Or, again, hallway medical care, you know, paramedics have been used to maintain patients. 0.96
00:00:47.180 So we know the simple solutions that a lay person can see.
00:00:49.680 Yeah, that doesn't make sense.
00:00:50.600 That's not very good.
00:00:51.180 Yet, it's like pulling teeth, getting Alberta Health Services to cooperate with changing some of these.
00:00:57.360 And I think you've hit the nail on the head.
00:00:59.720 Daniel Smith, I think, understands very well.
00:01:01.960 Our Premier understands very well exactly what's wrong with EMS.
00:01:05.180 She came to one of our town hall meetings in Airdrie before she was elected when we were speaking about EMS to the community.
00:01:11.880 And Alberta Health Services has certainly dragged its feet on this transfer issue.
00:01:17.520 It's been more than a year since they put out that RFP looking for contractors.
00:01:22.320 And I'm not quite sure why it took so long.
00:01:24.380 You know, in northern Alberta, north of Red Deer, 90% of patients interhospitally, and many of them by air, are moved by private contracted services.
00:01:33.240 This is not a new phenomenon.
00:01:34.600 And there are private contractors here in southern Alberta.
00:01:39.220 There's Aaron Paramedical, Genesis MediShuttle, MedSource.
00:01:42.900 It does a lot of oil field work.
00:01:44.980 I think it's called Lifelink Ambulance.
00:01:48.140 They do a lot of rodeos and standbys.
00:01:50.140 I mean, all of these qualified private operators that use registered paramedics on their ambulances are willing to step up.
00:01:57.980 And, in fact, Aaron Paramedical is moving patients almost weekly, still, with a phone call.
00:02:03.620 Yeah.
00:02:04.060 Yet they didn't get a shot at the RFP.
00:02:07.960 Yeah, they put out the RFP, but then they put a whole bunch of roadblocks and the usual bureaucratic crap.
00:02:14.400 And it was all done in secret.
00:02:15.740 Yes.
00:02:16.260 That was part of the frustration.
00:02:17.440 And I think for us dealing with Alberta Health Services and EMS, now, it's not just the fact that they've failed to fulfill their primary mandate,
00:02:27.260 which is the emergency care and transportation of sick and injured people in the community.
00:02:31.680 They've integrated us into health care a lot, including putting us in the hallway, right?
00:02:36.060 And you just can't survive.
00:02:37.340 An ambulance service can't survive when half your fleet's in the hallway.
00:02:40.660 So I think we know what the problems are.
00:02:43.080 And let's talk about this latest contract debacle.