18 Alberta communities had ambulance “red alerts” in last 2 months

Earlier this week, the Health Sciences Association of Alberta released information about the state of ambulance services in Alberta, and over 200 red alerts have been issued in a dozen communities since the end of August.

The union, which represents over 27,000 paramedical technical, professional and general support employees in the public and private healthcare sectors in Alberta, has been tracking ambulance activity since the end of August and publishing the results, including red alerts, on a new Facebook page they created.

A red alert is when no ambulance is available to respond to any potential emergencies.

During the first 50 days since the HSAA launched their new Facebook page, the following communities received red alerts:

Community	# of red alerts
Calgary	61
Edmonton	35
Cochrane	21
Grande Prairie	19
Airdrie	18
Red Deer	15
Kneehill County	10
Medicine Hat	8
Leduc	7
Stony Plain/Spruce Grove	4
Strathmore	4
Lacombe	4
Drumheller	3
Camrose	3
Okotoks/High River/Black Diamond	2
Wetaskiwin	2
Innisfail	1
Vegreville	1
Total	218

When communities lack ambulance service, AHS has to dispatch ambulances from surrounding communities to ensure emergency services are available. However, that then leaves those communities with insufficient service.

Not only that, but there were at least 66 communities that had no ambulance service available—despite having parked ambulances—because of insufficient staffing levels, some of them for multiple shifts:

In fact, as of the publication date for the HSAA’s media release, there were nearly 300 paramedic shifts throughout the province without anyone to staff them. And that’s just for this current week.

In addition to ambulances being unavailable, there have been over 50 occasions (basically, 1 a day on average) when ambulance response times was more than 20 minutes, and nearly half of those exceeded an hour.

The HSAA acknowledged that both the COVID-19 pandemic and opioid have played a role in this, but they said these simply worsened an already existing problem that has been building for over a decade.