Western Standard - Retired paramedic Don Sharpe on AHS hindering EMS reforms

00:00:00.000 And I've got Don Sharp in. He's a retired EMS paramedic. He's been on the show a number of times

00:00:07.320 before now, I believe. And he's in studio with me today to talk about these things. So, hey,

00:00:11.440 Don, good to see you back. Corey, good to see you again. Thanks very much.

00:00:14.460 I appreciate you coming in in this miserable weather. I mean, this winter's really hanging

00:00:17.980 in this. Right? No bugs. Yeah. So, I mean, where to begin? There's so much to cover on this.

00:00:23.640 Well, and there's been so much news lately, too. I mean, we've had that dysfunction in EMS

00:00:28.440 article that came out in Alberta Views. We had this recent lights and siren report from Michael

00:00:33.840 Korman, published by the Parkland Institute and funded by HSAA, the Union of Paramedics. We've had

00:00:39.800 all this in the news lately about this email from a Foothills ER manager, I guess, to her staff,

00:00:49.320 and somebody leaked it to the opposition and the legislature, and that caused a big

00:00:53.000 brouhaha. I could talk about what's going on in healthcare for hours, Corey. I could.

00:00:57.700 Yeah. Well, one I want to talk about, kind of start with the emails we had a couple weeks

00:01:00.800 ago before we hooked you on. And one of the fixes we want to have, I mean, you've talked

00:01:05.060 about these common sense fixes a lot for a long time, was patient transfer. You know,

00:01:09.060 we're using fully staffed and equipped, you know, paramedical vehicles to move a low, low-risk

00:01:17.060 patient from one facility to another as taking people off the street who are specialized and

00:01:22.540 trained for emergency response. Right. And tying them up. So, I mean, it sounds like,

00:01:28.140 okay, we're going to allow some other outside provision of these non-emergency transfers and

00:01:33.540 that. But then they put out this, this notice for, for the bids that basically put it right

00:01:38.860 out of bounds. It's like AHS is saying, oh, we're opening the door, but here, basically,

00:01:42.380 you've got to provide us with a fully equipped ambulance if you're going to do it.

00:01:45.100 Well, and again, let's look at the, at the basics of this problem is emergency ambulances,

00:01:50.860 the critical care vehicles that look after the sickest patients, staffed by our very best

00:01:55.260 paramedics, they're a finite resource. And to use those vehicles to transport patients who need a

00:02:00.960 cast change or need to go in to get fitted for orthotics, that's like taking a limousine to the

00:02:05.240 grocery store. It's way more vehicle than that person needs. So let's look at alternative transfers.

00:02:10.920 Let's make sure that those critical care vehicles are available for our sickest patients

00:02:14.860 patients. And isn't that the problem right now is a lot of them are stuck in the hospital hallway,

00:02:18.460 right? And they're not available in the community to respond. So it's, it's real easy for me to see

00:02:25.580 the need for alternative transport. This should have been done years ago. But again, AHS dragged its feet.

00:02:30.620 I asked them numerous times to look at this issue and they refused. Well, now they're kind of being

00:02:35.140 forced to. And let's look at, let's remember when we talk about AHS and the government, they're two

00:02:40.320 different things. AHS is the large bureaucracy that frequently takes instruction from the government

00:02:47.100 or has in the past and gone, yeah, yeah, we'll get on that. Right. And then they either do it for six

00:02:51.440 months and ignore it or just refuse to do it altogether. So now they've been instructed by the

00:02:55.580 advisory committee to actually enable alternative transport, which right now, Corey, is happening.

00:03:01.520 There's a paramedical company here in town right now that is taking phone calls from the Foothills

00:03:06.800 Hospital. In fact, they have two trucks staged at the Foothills right now, private operators to move

00:03:11.680 patients out of the Foothills Emerge to places where they need to go stable, non-emergent patients.

00:03:18.000 And there's also, I know every day, because I talk to these people, I talk to the crews,

00:03:22.960 they're taking calls, they're doing transfers from the Peter Lougheed to the Foothills, from cardiac

00:03:27.280 rehab centers to nursing homes. It's happening now. And it's happening with a phone call.

00:03:31.680 Hi, I need an ambulance to move a patient from the PLC to the Foothills. Can you do it by 2.30?

00:03:39.360 Yep, no problem. Click. So what's AHS's answer? That's the question. From what I understand,

00:03:46.720 hearing about this new request for interest is that AHS is going to try to put a mobile data

00:03:55.120 terminal in every one of these transfer vehicles. These vehicles only have to be staffed to admit or

00:04:02.400 equipped to a minimum standard. I understand with an AED and a basic first aid kit.

00:04:06.640 They don't have a lot of equipment. They've got a couple of basic providers who are provincially

00:04:11.120 registered. They're trained. They've been hired by a responsible business owner who probably this isn't

00:04:17.840 his main business. Some of them, a lot of them do oil field work, but they have high quality vehicles.

00:04:22.720 They have high quality staff. They're able to start tomorrow moving patients. But AHS is going,

00:04:28.880 we got to go through this whole big rigmarole. We got to make sure we got to check your financial

00:04:32.560 underwear. We got to have a quick pick at your details. And we got to make sure, I mean, I think

00:04:37.120 it's onerous. I think it's irresponsible. And I don't think AHS can put any of these alternative

00:04:42.640 transport vehicles in that fashion on the street until the end of June. And we need them today.

00:04:48.320 Well, and we need them today. And those vehicles are there now. I mean,

00:04:50.800 I worked in the oil field for 20 years. They're fine vehicles. They're often,

00:04:55.920 yeah, at this time of year, there's a lot of them sitting on standby, more than equipped enough to

00:05:00.640 just take some of the load off. Every one of these vehicles that takes somebody from hospital to

00:05:03.840 hospital means that you've got some highly trained paramedics are now available somewhere else.

00:05:08.400 Right. But so here's the question, who's enabling these transfers, making them happen,

00:05:14.000 and who's blocking them at AHS? Well, the people who are making it happen are brave unit managers

00:05:20.320 at some of the hospitals who say, look, I have three patients in my eMERGE. I've got a lot of

00:05:25.520 people waiting in the hallway to get into eMERGE. I need these patients taken back to the nursing home

00:05:29.920 right now, not six hours from now, not tomorrow, right now. So I'm going to phone a private company,

00:05:35.520 and they're going to come and get these patients. They're going to move them where they need to go.

00:05:38.880 And they send the bill to Alberta Health and they get paid. And it's a reasonable fee. They're not

00:05:43.840 grossly, they're not overcharging or gouging anybody. And they're getting the patients moved

00:05:48.800 safely and quickly. Those brave unit managers are succeeding in this. Now there's unit managers

00:05:55.520 at urgent cares in places like Cochrane and Okotoks who frankly refuse. Say, I don't care what happens,

00:06:02.080 I'm not calling. I'm going to call AHS. I want an AHS ambulance because I don't want to get in trouble.

00:06:08.880 So those patients, remember some of these urgent cares close at 10 o'clock at night.

00:06:13.600 If there's a serious patient in the urgent care in Okotoks, Cochrane, any one of these places,

00:06:19.360 10 o'clock comes, the urgent care closes, but that patient's still there waiting for transport.

00:06:24.000 So now the urgent care manager has to keep a nurse and sometimes a doctor overnight at overtime to look

00:06:31.600 after people that if they had simply called somebody else, if there was somebody else available,

00:06:36.160 they could call that patient would get moved to the hospital.

00:06:38.640 So we've got a big bureaucracy. You've got levels and levels, unfortunately,

00:06:41.920 of resistance. I mean, that's the hard thing. With a big ship, it just doesn't turn easily.

00:06:45.360 It takes forever.

00:06:46.160 You did mention the union. And I mean, the unions have been excellent

00:06:50.960 in highlighting, for example, the way rural amulets have been drained and pulled into the

00:06:55.040 city and misappropriated in my view. But at the same time, isn't there a bit of the resistance,

00:07:01.040 I guess, when it comes to, because that's instinctive for a lot of unions. Well, we don't allow private in here,

00:07:04.640 though. We can't let another group come in here and start taking care of it.

00:07:07.120 Well, look at this latest report by Michael Korman, published by the Parkland Institute,

00:07:11.200 commissioned by HSAA, the union. Neither one of them are interested in talking about privatization.

00:07:16.080 They're very much against it. And I would support 100% public health care if they could do the job.

00:07:21.840 But I think AHS and especially EMS have proven they can't. We simply don't have the vehicles or the

00:07:27.120 staff to move patients right now. And I'm not talking about, we could grow more paramedics. Do you

00:07:32.320 remember that article? Bill, I can't remember, Bill McFarlane published. He blamed the lack of

00:07:39.120 paramedics these days on the low birth rate over the last several years. I laughed so hard. He

00:07:43.440 wouldn't call me back. I don't think he wanted to talk about it. It takes time to train paramedics and

00:07:48.000 buy trucks. New ambulances, by the way, from, you can look it up, wheeled coach type three,

00:07:54.400 brand new ambulances, $240,000 US. That's prohibitive.

00:07:58.800 Over a quarter million dollars. It's a huge investment. So we've got responsible business

00:08:03.280 owners who own these trucks. They maintain them, frankly, better than AHS. I used to work on an

00:08:09.200 ambulance not too long ago for AHS. Their vehicles are not well maintained. They are not clean.

00:08:16.160 You sent me that picture of the gas tank, a simple maintenance issue.

00:08:20.480 There's so many of those. They don't manage their own fleet very well. And yet they want to be able to

00:08:25.840 micromanage a responsible private business owner's fleet and their staff. It's frustrating. It's

00:08:31.520 frustrating to see this unfolding. And it's frustrating to see the non-cooperative and

00:08:35.040 unfortunately the reality politicized attitude of trying to make sure that the current government

00:08:39.440 isn't successful no matter what they try. I mean, I'm really seeing some of that.

00:08:42.720 Wow. Yeah, it's true.

00:08:43.280 And when there was that leaked email about the memo and everybody lit their hair on fire and suddenly

00:08:48.320 the government's on its heels and backtracking because the memo is saying,

00:08:51.440 we want these ambulances out of here within 45 minutes.

00:08:54.480 Yeah. And what did Notley say in the lead? She said,

00:08:58.560 patients are going to get dumped and emerge. Okay, let's back the truck up. Number one,

00:09:02.000 that letter, that email was written internally from a manager at the ER to her staff. And quite frankly,

00:09:08.080 I think that's an email written by a weak leader. That whole attitude of that was, we're going to fail,

00:09:13.680 look out. You know what? That 45 minute target time is, that's a target. It's not a hard stop on March

00:09:21.280 15th, 45 minutes, we're going to leave. No, I mean, nurses and paramedics are very responsible.

00:09:26.800 We're never just going to drop people and run away. That's, especially if they need extra care.

00:09:31.520 So that's a target time. March 15th was going to be a slow rollout. It wasn't well publicized,

00:09:37.040 but the medics and the nurses knew about it. We're all kind of cooperating. What's the goal here?

00:09:41.840 The goal is to move patients into the hospital in a timely and efficient manner so that we can then

00:09:48.000 extricate the medics out of the hospital, get them back into the communities where they serve, 0.99

00:09:52.880 so that patients aren't waiting an hour for, Corey, you know, people are scared. Like I,

00:09:58.880 we have all of these citizen action groups and that is the primary comment now on most of our

00:10:04.800 citizen action groups is, you know what? I'm afraid. I'm afraid that if I call an ambulance,

00:10:08.480 I'm not going to be able to get one. I might have to drive my mom to the hospital

00:10:11.600 myself. And setting a target at 45 minutes to get somebody in, drop off, do the paperwork,

00:10:18.400 do the transfer and get out. I mean, that's the goal. And that's a long, I mean, that sounds

00:10:23.200 unreasonably long already. It's twice as long as we used to drop them off. And, and not only that,

00:10:28.720 but the Canadian standard for turnaround times in hospitals and emerge is 45 minutes. Alberta is the

00:10:36.240 outlier right now with AHS is 90 minute turnaround time. It's a, and it's gone on far too long. Like

00:10:43.120 I said, they've had years to fix this. And again, making it clear the government can only do so much.

00:10:49.440 There's legislation that prevents them from moving too quickly to make changes at AHS. That's for a

00:10:54.720 reason. But AHS has got a responsibility here that they've failed to fulfill. And I think I, at the end of

00:11:01.200 the day, this is a leadership problem. And we need erasing the board, the healthcare board was a great

00:11:08.480 move. Making sure moving on from having our chief paramedic in charge. And, and now we have a provincial

00:11:16.320 lead, a provincial head of EMS, Athena Metzolopoulos, you know, she's done some work before with the red tape

00:11:21.920 reduction project, I think she's very skilled. So I'm looking forward to some positive changes. But

00:11:26.480 again, alternative transport, that should be happening right now. Not next week, not two weeks

00:11:33.040 from now, not three months from now, certainly. The vehicles and the equipment, the people are ready

00:11:37.920 to do it right now. And they're needed right now. Well, yeah, and it's a solution in front of our

00:11:41.680 faces. I mean, a lot of the things that, again, we listened to, and I won't even go left, right,

00:11:45.280 we're hearing it in every province, but saying, we have more money, more money. Well, no, if there's only a

00:11:48.960 finite number of bodies, you can pump all the money in there that you want. I mean, if we're talking about

00:11:54.080 nurses and doctors, but when we are talking about patient transfer, actually, we do have the means

00:11:58.480 handy, we have the trucks, we have the people, money will take care of that. And it's not expensive.

00:12:03.840 That's the thing, these guys aren't looking for a windfall. I'm not sure exactly what the financial

00:12:09.440 structure is going to be, I hear it's going to be a flat fee, based on so many transfers a day.

00:12:14.240 Here's the interesting thing, though, what HS wants is total control of these private operators

00:12:19.360 resources. In other words, they want to put an MDT in the truck, a computer, so the crews have to

00:12:25.440 learn how to use that. They want to control, here there's going to be a rule that they can't refuse

00:12:31.360 a transfer. So if you're offered a transfer, you're told to do a transfer at the end of the day,

00:12:36.080 that's going to run you past the end of your shift. That's fine. In EMS, we understand late trips.

00:12:41.440 But if it's going to happen three times out of four shifts that you end up doing a late trip,

00:12:46.240 I mean, this is what they're doing to the emerge crews now, keeping them late, running them hard,

00:12:50.960 burning them out. And that's why 40% of them are off six. So again, I don't see I've talked to

00:12:58.240 some of these people who work as as they used to work for HS. But now they've left HS, they don't

00:13:04.080 want anything to do with HS EMS. And they've gone to work for these private operators, they say,

00:13:08.480 what are you going to do the first time somebody says you have to stay late and do a transfer? He goes,

00:13:11.600 huh, that's not going to go well. Well, and unfortunately, why left,

00:13:15.680 it sets up some of the conflict potentially too. And that's why you get fearful of when they start

00:13:19.680 basically already creeping in and turning these alternative transport vehicles into full out

00:13:24.400 ambulances, you give it two more years, next thing you know, well, now we're going to require you to

00:13:27.520 be unionized. Now we're going to require your certification to be up to paramedic level. Next

00:13:32.080 thing you know, you're back to basically HS ambulances on the road again, that can be tied up

00:13:36.560 very expensively doing patient transfers that we were trying to avoid in the first place.

00:13:41.280 Yeah, that kind of creep. I guess I hadn't thought of that as certainly possible. I mean,

00:13:44.640 my focus is the immediate problem right now of just the patient who's right now in the High River

00:13:50.080 Hospital. She's an inpatient, she needs a stretcher to get to South Health Campus to get an MRI. 0.99

00:13:55.840 Right now, the nurses will phone and say, I need an ambulance tomorrow to move a patient on a 0.78

00:14:00.080 stretcher for MRI. If she doesn't make that appointment, that MRI sits empty, she doesn't get looked after. 0.94

00:14:06.240 And that's happening over and over and over. And that can be changed. That's a stable stretcher

00:14:10.800 patient that could go. Now, here's the other problem, this alternative transport issue that

00:14:15.600 AHS has got planned, isn't going to affect any communities outside of a 50 kilometer radius

00:14:22.400 from Calgary or Edmonton, big centers. So if you live in Banff or Canmore, you're outside,

00:14:27.760 no, that's not going to affect you. Or if you live in Sundry, Sundry right now is moving patients

00:14:32.720 sometimes by taxi to the city. And their concern at the hospital is who's going to pay for that.

00:14:38.880 So when I heard that question, I said, send it to Alberta Health Services,

00:14:42.720 send it to the same people, these other paramedical outfits. And I mean, that's,

00:14:46.960 that should be paid for by this organization, AHS, that said they were going to take care

00:14:53.120 of EMS and inter-hospital transfers, and quite frankly, isn't doing a good job. Here's,

00:14:58.160 they, they're not doing a good job now. Now they want to take on the additional

00:15:03.120 monster of alternative transfer. You think they welcome, you know,

00:15:06.240 take some of this off our hands because we've got a million other things we're doing.

00:15:09.040 Right. NHS believes that there's no amount of managers that they can hire. We're always going

00:15:14.400 to need one more manager. So that's another, like, it's, I think the whole thing's crazy. It's,

00:15:20.080 they're, they're not doing themselves a service. They're not doing patients any service.

00:15:24.320 And I'd like to see them move forward with a more, with a, with a quicker solution.

00:15:29.120 Well, we've been talking about it for years. And that's part of the issue.

00:15:31.760 And I mean,

00:15:32.160 Should have happened years ago.

00:15:32.880 Governments move very slowly with it too. I mean, we keep bringing up, I mean,

00:15:36.720 it was that horrific case of that woman who was attacked by dogs and most definitely could have

00:15:42.160 possibly been saved with a quicker response. She was a 10 minute drive from the biggest hospital in

00:15:47.200 Alberta.

00:15:47.680 So let me jump on this. Another little side note here, the Health Quality Council of Alberta,

00:15:52.400 Alberta, they're the ones who did the report on the fatal dog bite. They left out all of the issues

00:15:57.200 with leadership. They didn't mention leadership and poor leadership at eight, not even once.

00:16:02.160 I appear, I spoke, I phoned them and said, can I come in and talk to you in 2018? I went to the

00:16:08.160 Health Quality Council, I made a presentation. I said, your little focus website you have with all

00:16:12.160 the times. I said, keep some EMS stats, response times, hospital turnaround times, hospital wait times.

00:16:18.880 Oh yeah, we can't do that. We're, we're really busy. I said, no, this is important. And this is

00:16:23.280 healthcare. This is EMS. This is hospital. Yeah, no, we're too busy. I got blown off by them two or

00:16:29.920 three times. And you know what? Now I see them doing this fatal dog bite review and I go, you guys

00:16:35.520 dropped the ball. Health Quality Council of Alberta dropped the ball four years ago. They could have,

00:16:40.560 they could have gotten in front of this and actually been part of the solution rather than sweeping up the

00:16:45.200 mess with this report on that fatal dog bite attack. So getting onto the solution,

00:16:48.960 you know, how do you, I mean, you're trying piecemeal. We've got things that are proposed

00:16:53.440 here and there, but again, you got that, that, that big monstrous leviathan of a bureaucracy with

00:16:58.080 AHS. What can government or people or just anybody do? How are we, how? That's, that's the hardest

00:17:03.440 question. I mean, you know, the solutions, but how can we get this machine to embrace the solutions?

00:17:07.600 Well, the first thing you got to do is you got to talk to the people that are doing the work.

00:17:12.240 Right now, the only time they talk to the people that have solutions or make suggestions is they

00:17:17.200 punish them. Take a look at that paramedic right now who's been disciplined multiple times

00:17:22.240 for speaking up, simply FOIPing documents and going and speaking to a reporter. Brave kid. I am a,

00:17:28.320 he's a, he's a brave guy. He's got a family. He could lose his job. He won't quit fighting. And that's,

00:17:34.320 it's a, it's unfortunate. That's what it has to come to. And again, that's a leadership issue.

00:17:38.000 If my, you want my opinion of what we should do now, the first thing we should do. So we should

00:17:43.200 start replacing some of the people that are leaders in this organization, not just EMS,

00:17:48.320 but the hospitals too. Quite frankly, how many years have they had to solve issues like access block,

00:17:54.560 moving patients from emerge into the hospital? And I hear all the time, number one, it's a long-term

00:18:00.160 care problem. Okay, great. You've got a problem, not an EMS problem. Right. And then they tell me,

00:18:04.960 well, we're all on the same team for patient care. You know, you got to, I said, well, I agree.

00:18:08.720 We're all on the same team for patient care in the hospital, but don't forget when it's three o'clock

00:18:13.840 in the morning, it's 40 below. And I'm in a ditch on the side of a highway at an overturned car.

00:18:18.960 I don't see anybody from the hospital on my team. That's an EMS responsibility. You know,

00:18:24.160 picking people up who've been hurt and are sick critically in communities. That's my job.

00:18:29.040 Well, and that's a specialized skill. It takes a certain kind of person to do it. Just as an EMS,

00:18:34.240 a paramedic wouldn't necessarily be a good nurse. I mean, that's a separate skill as well. And,

00:18:39.280 and, and, you know, I know people who are both nurses and paramedics. They're fantastic people.

00:18:44.480 And I know terrific practitioners who are able to straddle that. I never could. I mean,

00:18:49.360 I was a good paramedic at best. You know, I've worked with some great, great clinicians,

00:18:54.480 great paramedics. I think some of the things that I've seen are just process issues. You know,

00:19:00.480 why, why, why is this taking so long? Where's the paperwork? Why am I here when this has to be done?

00:19:06.880 And again, in EMS, you know, when you show up on a call and somebody is critically ill,

00:19:11.840 we're trained to move very quickly. And then we drive lights inside of the hospital and you give

00:19:16.160 report to triage and they send you down the hallway and you're going, are you kidding?

00:19:19.360 Like this guy's sick, but their process is different and their problems are different.

00:19:23.920 Now back to my original point, which is if you can't find somebody to fix these hospital problems,

00:19:30.640 start replacing people.

00:19:31.840 Well, and there's something, I mean, consequences for senior managers,

00:19:35.280 and someone want to bring up is, I mean, AHS, it was a representative who was caught in an outright lie.

00:19:40.640 That was on the documentary. The great one was CTV with Kathy Lee.

00:19:43.600 Yep.

00:19:44.000 When he said we do not discipline people for speaking up and then after it pops up,

00:19:49.120 well, here's one being disciplined for speaking up. Now there should be consequences for him lying

00:19:53.040 to the public on a critical issue like this. There was no consequence.

00:19:57.120 You know, it's funny. One of the, one of the managers mentioned, well, he retired and I go,

00:20:01.120 well, did he retire or was there? And he goes, actually, we can't talk about it. I said, well,

00:20:06.640 if you can't talk about it, he probably didn't just retire, did he?

00:20:10.560 So, and that's, more of that needs to happen. But again, what's the biggest problem after

00:20:15.120 leadership is transparency and accountability, AHS. AHS doesn't want people FOIPing data. They

00:20:21.040 make it very difficult to actually get, and they, you know, these presentations that EMS goes out to,

00:20:26.880 they send executive directors out to speak to these town councils in these small towns,

00:20:31.040 and they just baffle them with all this gibberish, which is what it is, if it's medicine, right? And it's

00:20:36.320 all these statistics and a PowerPoint. And really, town councils should be going, wait,

00:20:40.480 I don't need any more information. Where's my ambulance? I want it here when my people need it.

00:20:46.880 And that's, that should be just a line in the sand. And like Jeff Ganung, the mayor of Cochrane

00:20:51.600 said after the last presentation in Cochrane, he said, look, people here are scared. And after years

00:20:57.760 of asking for better service, trust has been eroded. People don't trust AHS anymore. He says,

00:21:03.360 we got to repair that. Well, and you've been very active in Cochrane out there. I mean,

00:21:07.760 you've got some great people working on things out there and doing stuff. Great group. And part

00:21:11.680 of what the last time you were in talking with me, we talked about was some efforts and municipalities 0.98

00:21:16.960 to say, you know what, screw you guys. We'll take care of it ourselves. We will do it. And, but that's

00:21:21.920 where we're seeing the creep with AHS seems to be, well, we're going to find ways to regulate this out

00:21:25.600 of existence too. Well, here's an interesting one, fire departments. You saw what happened in the MD of Willow

00:21:31.040 Creek? The MD of Willow Creek bought three ambulances. Now you can't call them that because

00:21:35.600 it's against the law. It's a fire department, paramedical response, whatever. It's an ambulance.

00:21:41.120 So they bought three of them and they put one in Fort McLeod and Claire's home in Nanton because they

00:21:46.640 saw repeatedly that they were spending long time on scene with critical patients who they needed to

00:21:52.400 move. And how many times I think Canmore, yeah, Canmore just last weekend moved a patient in the fire

00:21:58.160 truck to the hospital. We don't have a lot of details. We don't need a lot of details. We've

00:22:01.920 all heard the stories, but now, and I think it's my opinion. And this is what I've told people is

00:22:08.000 every fire department in Alberta should have an ambulance, a fire paramedical response vehicle.

00:22:12.960 But if for three reasons, number one, you go to a big fire, that's a good place to rehab your

00:22:16.960 firefighters. Get them in, take a pressure if you need to. Number two, it's a safe place to look after

00:22:21.920 people at a car crash on the highway, out of the elements. You got to, you got a place where you can

00:22:25.440 literally sit eight people so they're not freezing cold, sitting in their overturned car or stand on

00:22:30.320 the side of the road. And three, it's a place you can use as a base for treatment. You go over and you

00:22:35.840 find a lady who's fallen and broken her hip in her driveway. You're going to leave her in the snow for

00:22:40.640 40 minutes till AHS gets there, or are you going to put her in a nice warm bus design? And number four,

00:22:46.400 if you have to transport, giddy up. You phone medical control. You say, listen, I got a lady here who's 1.00

00:22:51.280 really sick. AHS is too far away. Hospital's 10 minutes away. We're going to, we'd like to go.

00:22:56.160 Oh, we didn't. And that's that overlap of the skills too. I mean, you know, we know that there's

00:23:00.880 a degree of emergency health training for firefighters, but they are firefighters. Their

00:23:06.960 primary role is getting that fire. We don't expect the paramedic to go into a place where the propane

00:23:12.080 tanks ready to blow and knowing what to do with that. And we don't expect a firefighter to be the best

00:23:15.680 paramedic. Well, hang on. I'll disagree with you there because Cochrane has a number of,

00:23:20.960 I think they have eight or 10 people who are trained to the absolute top paramedic level.

00:23:25.680 A lot of them work part-time for EMS. They're terrific practitioners. I would work with any

00:23:30.560 one of them. I would let them treat my family. They're terrific paramedics. There's also small

00:23:34.960 services, volunteer services in towns where they really have the minimum MFR, medical first responder

00:23:40.320 training. And they do a great job too. They can do CPR. They can stop the bleeding. They can hold

00:23:44.640 somebody's head still in a crash. But you know, there's lots of fire departments who quite frankly,

00:23:49.760 could run an ambulance service tomorrow better than AHS could. And I encourage every fire department

00:23:54.880 to get an FPRV. I won't devolve into the Prentice issues as we have in my area. I mean, we,

00:24:00.880 and our proximity to the city means we are constantly drained of our local resources. And it's frustrating.

00:24:05.760 Prentice is known as the bitch truck. Nobody wants to work it because it's never there. 0.99

00:24:09.600 No, it's too close to the city. It's just there right for the taking.

00:24:12.720 Yeah, it gets it goes to cover everywhere else. And it just means that maybe you don't deserve

00:24:17.760 the same coverage as the city. Yeah, it doesn't sit well, does it?

00:24:21.680 No, no, it doesn't.

00:24:22.960 They've got a resident down there who's going to make more noise about that yet.

00:24:25.600 That's good to hear.

00:24:26.800 All right. Well, there's so much to cover. I mean, it goes fast when I have you in,

00:24:29.760 Don, we'll have to have you back because this issue is just so frustrating, so stupid, so 0.98

00:24:33.520 relatively easy, at least to bring in some solutions. And we've got resistance to those solutions. 0.98

00:24:38.160 It just ticks me off every time. I really appreciate that you keep bringing it up and highlighting it and

00:24:42.240 putting this stuff on the web and Facebook and such. So before I let you go, where can people

00:24:47.280 find more info? Because I know people are concerned everywhere with this one, but it's just a shotgun

00:24:51.040 approach. Right, because you're seeing it in the news all the time. So we found Facebook to really

00:24:54.640 be really effective. Citizen action groups in each community are springing up and people are

00:24:59.280 working together to try to put pressure on their, on HS locally and also on their town councils,

00:25:03.680 give them good advice and back them up. And I really hope that RJ Sigurdsson, who's doing great work as

00:25:09.920 the parliamentary secretary. I really hope that he starts touring around the province

00:25:13.600 and meeting with people in these towns and talking about EMS. And I encourage people locally,

00:25:18.480 especially in the smaller communities, to get together and start working on solutions. Call me

00:25:23.120 anytime. You can find me on the web. Great. Well, thank you very much, Don,

00:25:26.720 and I'm sure we'll be talking again. Thanks, Corey. All right. Without the CSSA, our gun rights would have

00:25:31.920 been taken long, long ago. These guys are on the front lines, helping to draft smart and intelligent

00:25:38.720 firearms regulations and legislation in Canada. And more importantly, educating the public about

00:25:44.720 how we keep guns out of the hands of the wrong people. To become a member, it's absolutely worth

00:25:49.600 every penny. You can become a Western standard member for just $10 a month or $99 a year for unlimited access.

Western Standard - March 09, 2023

Retired paramedic Don Sharpe on AHS hindering EMS reforms

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