COCHRANE— The Cochrane Legion was packed with concerned citizens Tuesday (Aug. 10) for a public town hall addressing the issue of poor ambulance response times, and laying the foundation of a citizen action committee to advocate for the working conditions of EMS personnel.
The town hall was organized by Don Sharpe and George Porter, two lifelong paramedics who have been publicly advocating for better working conditions in the province and more comprehensive coverage for Alberta’s communities.
Porter said he has routinely seen large areas of the province without ambulance coverage.
“I’ve seen many times where there is not a single ambulance available to respond to an emergency from Airdrie to Lethbridge, and from day one I’ve been saying you cannot, cannot, cannot be doing this, it’s not right.”
During the town hall attendees heard harrowing and impassioned stories of loss and grief, frustration and anger from first responders and civilians, all of which had a similar tone of urgency, pressing Alberta Health Services to recognize the issues and to take action to address the situation in the province.
The majority of the problems EMS is seeing with long response times began in 2010 when the management of those services was taken away from municipalities and given to the province, Porter said. Since that time, ambulances in Alberta have been stretched thin, often responding to calls in communities hours away from their own, stuck in hospitals with non-emergency patients waiting to be admitted or being used as taxies to transfer patients from one medical centre to another while other services exist to provide the same function.
“Never in my wildest dreams did I believe twelve years later I would be beating on the same drum,” Porter said. “If we had some leadership, if we had people who truly believed what they say in the media and what they say in their letters and memos and stuff, that everything they do is in the best interest of the patient, if that were true, Don and I wouldn’t be here. If they looked after their staff, if they took the concerns and the pleadings and the distress of the medics over these 12 years to heart, Don and I wouldn’t be here tonight. It’s gotten to the point where communities like Cochrane, as you know, you rarely have any ambulances.”
That situation routinely leads to the declaration of a “code red,” which means that there are no ambulances available to respond to a given community, and is typically only talked about when large cities like Calgary or Edmonton are in that status.
What happens is a cascading effect for all of the communities around those large urban centres, due to ambulances being pulled from surrounding rural areas.
“When Calgary is in code red so is Cochrane, Airdrie, Canmore, Priddis, Black Diamond, Okotoks, probably High River, Vulcan, Chestermere, Strathmore, everybody around you in this 60, 80, 100-mile radius, depending on how busy it is, is in Calgary. It’s not a code red in Calgary, it is a massive code red,” he said.
All it takes is for a single ambulance to be able to respond in that entire area for the code red status to be rescinded, Porter added.
Because management at Alberta Health Services seems either unwilling or unable to address the problems EMS is facing, Porter said, he is hoping this tour of town halls will start a “grassroots” citizen-led movement that will pressure the organization into addressing the province.
Sandy Gourlie, a career firefighter and advanced care paramedic shared the story of her daughter, 30-year-old Lindsay Gourlie, during the town hall.
At approximately 1 a.m. on Jan. 15, 2021, Gourlie and her husband received a call from her old fire department captain informing her that her daughter had suffered a cardiac event and died.
Although Gourlie was not told at that time, she later received a call from the director of EMS dispatch, who informed her there were complications with the paramedic’s response.
There was a delay in dispatching fire and EMS that was blamed on a combination of computer and human error, Gourlie said.
She would later find out that paramedics took nearly 30 minutes to respond to the call, during which time Lindsay’s boyfriend performed CPR while waiting for medics to arrive.
“It’s exhausting to do CPR,” Gourlie explained. “Even with firefighters, who are big strong guys, CPR is switched out approximately every two minutes, because it’s exhausting, it’s much harder than you might think … Her poor boyfriend did that for 30 minutes, and he’s traumatized.”
Gourlie said she does not blame the medics who responded, some of whom were friends of hers and friends to her daughter, but rather places the fault on the system which is overburdening these individuals to the point of exhaustion.
Gourlie and her husband are now left questioning what would have happened if the system had functioned the way it was intended to.
“Would our daughter had survived if she had immediate help? I guess only the big guy knows upstairs,” she said. “But I feel that the delay— And also [Lindsay’s doctor] who wrote the letter to EMS— Felt that could have definitely contributed to her death. How many more people have to go through that? Too many before something is done.”
The situation EMS now faces is one where medics are becoming increasingly overworked and exhausted, which could potentially have an effect on patient outcomes. Gourlie explained that the ability to process the traumatic events that paramedics encounter declines significantly when they are suffering from mental exhaustion.
Now, with paramedics routinely working up to 16-hour shifts, their exhaustion is increasing and their mental health is rapidly declining, she said.
Gourlie put out an open invitation to have EMS staff who have faced difficult working conditions, or are concerned about the lack of ambulance coverage to message her and received nearly 200 responses.
She said many staff of Alberta Health Services have been asked to sign non-disclosure agreements, or are afraid of losing their jobs for speaking publicly about these issues.
“Staff are absolutely terrified to speak up for fear of retribution,” she said.
At the end of the meeting, Don Sharpe put out a call to those in attendance to join a citizen action committee that would be responsible for advocating on behalf of the province’s paramedics.
“Our goal here tonight is to make sure that our ambulances remain in our communities to serve the citizens of those communities, period,” Sharpe said. “No mutual aid agreement was ever designed to constantly suck your emergency resources into the urban centres and keep them all day and all night.”
