Edmonton EMS ‘under pressure,’ increasing calls for outside help

Alberta Health Services has asked surrounding communities to help ease an ambulance backlog in Edmonton, a memo shows. Nicole Weisberg reports.

An Alberta Health Services (AHS) memo to staff, shared with CTV News Edmonton, says ambulance services are “under pressure” due a backlog of patients in hospital – prompting calls for help to surrounding communities.

The memo, sent to EMS staff from AHS leadership on Wednesday, states that “the ability to move patients through the system has resulted in higher-than-normal workloads” despite relatively consistent call volumes.

AHS said, as of January, EMS spent 2 hours offloading patients at hospitals 90 per cent of the time. It said that is down from 3.1 hours in November 2022.

It did not say how the current workloads were impacting that time frame, but confirmed it was adding additional stretchers at sites to help.

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Mike Parker is the president of Health Sciences Association of Alberta (HSAA), the union representing paramedics and EMS workers across Alberta.

He said paramedics are “burning out” and that a recent HSAA survey showed 89 per cent of members believe the current system is in crisis.

“This directive to ready patient stretchers inside ambulance bays is just one more sign of the short-staffing issues being felt by patients and professionals across our health-care system,” Parker said in a statement.

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Advanced-care paramedic Summer Penney spent seven years working for AHS EMS before quitting last summer. She said she often worked full shifts of back-to-back to calls.

“In the olden days, you would finish a 911 call, get to go back to a station. You could have a meal, have a snack, have a nap, chat with friends,” she said. “We don’t do that anymore. We don’t get to a station.”

The president of the Strathcona County Professional Firefighters Association, the union branch representing Strathcona firefighter-paramedics, said the problems in Edmonton are impacting his community.

“Our members respond to the city quite frequently, increasing the amount of time that they’re on ambulance calls,” Eric Lowe said. “The more ambulance calls you do, the more you see people stressed out, the higher burnout rate, you see sick time go through the roof.”

Lowe said he’s noticed a recent increase in how many times his members are being called to Edmonton – especially for night and weekend shifts.

“Recently, our members did an entire 14-hour night shift in Edmonton and didn’t do a single call in Strathcona County,” he said.

“It increases the workload on my members,” he continued. “They are more fatigued, they’re more stressed. They’re seeing and doing a lot more calls than they normally would do.”

The Cities of Leduc and St. Albert confirmed with CTV News Edmonton that they have also seen a recent rise in the number of calls to help with Edmonton EMS, with Leduc noting it’s been “more than average” over the past few months.

Penney now works for a contract provider in rural Alberta and was also called into Edmonton last weekend.

AHS said Edmonton is currently seeing high patient volumes in line with mid-winter peak times and that it is “not uncommon” to pull in resources from surrounding communities during surge situations.

Penney and Lowe believe staffing issues with AHS EMS are also to blame.

When asked about reports from paramedics about burnout and short staffing, AHS said it recognizes EMS services are under strain but that it is making “substantial progress.”

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It said it hired 296 paramedics last year, including 164 full-time staff and 129 casual, and as of January, there were 1,347 EMS staff in the Edmonton Zone.

“The key measure of EMS performance is response times,” AHS said in a statement. “In Edmonton, the 90th percentile response time for a life-threatening event was 17.7 minutes in November 2022, when the system was under the most strain.

“By January 2025, it had improved to 15.1 minutes. We’ll continue working to reach our target of 12 minutes.”

Penney said paramedics should be responding even sooner.

“Think about cardiac arrest, for example. You’re not breathing and you don’t have a pulse. For every one minute that you are not defibrillated with an AED, your chance of mortality increases by 10 per cent,” she said.

The Heart and Stroke Foundation reports that the survival rate for a cardiac arrest after more than 12 minutes drops to 5 per cent.

The health ministry declined to answer questions about staffing and longer-than-average transfer times, saying instead that response times are down in Edmonton and Red Deer and that hospital transfer times are down province-wide.

It said Budget 2025 includes $674 million in operating expenses for EMS, up $56 million from the 2024-25 forecast. That includes $60 million to upgrade and replace aging EMS vehicles and ambulances.

With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Nicole Weisberg