Leth. EMS drug responses rising again?

The Government of Alberta recently updated the data on the Alberta substance use surveillance system, which it uses to communicate information about substance use in the province.

The new data includes EMS responses to opioid-related events up to the end of March 2024. Hospitalization and SCS usage data haven’t been updated beyond September 2023, and deaths haven’t been updated since November.

My last story on EMS in Lethbridge had EMS data up to December. Since then, Lethbridge EMS responded to 37 opioid-related events, which is the second lowest first quarter ever recorded. In March alone, we saw 22 of those responses, however, the third highest of any March on record.

2018	19
2019	13
2020	14
2021	43
2022	17
2023	33
2024	22

Here it is in graph form:

During the first 12 months after the SCS closed down in August 2020, Lethbridge saw 337 opioid-related events that EMS responded to. This was the highest number of such events during the same period over those first 4 years.

Sep 2018–Aug 2019	236
Sep 2019–Aug 2020	269
Sep 2020–Aug 2021	337
Sep 2021–Aug 2022	322
Sep 2022–Aug 2023	441

In the first 12 months after the SCS was closed due to the UCP government cancelling funding, Lethbridge EMS responded to an average of 28.1 drug responses a month, up from 22.4 during the same 12-month period the previous year. They also increased from 5.2 responses per week, on average, to 6.5 per week.

During the second year after the SCS was shut down, we saw 322 EMS responses to drug events.

While that’s less than the 337 we saw between September 2020 and August 2021, it’s the second highest number seen during the same period over those first 4 years.

Here are the monthly and weekly averages of EMS drug responses, which increased in the most recent 12-month period.

	2018–19	2019–20	2020–21	2021–22	2022–23
Avg/month	19.7	22.4	28.1	26.8	36.8
Avg/week	4.5	5.2	6.5	6.2	8.5

And that makes sense, since we saw the highest number of EMS drug responses between any September through August period since 2018–2019.

Sep 2018–Aug 2019	236
Sep 2019–Aug 2020	269
Sep 2020–Aug 2021	337
Sep 2021–Aug 2022	322
Sep 2022–Aug 2023	441

That’s the first time Lethbridge has passed the 400 mark in this reporting period.

Here’s how the first quarter’s numbers compare to all the other months since August of 2020, the last month the SCS was open.

As you can see, the number of drug responses that the Lethbridge EMS were responding to began to decline in the latter half of 2021, but then the trend reversed in the summer of 2022, with increases nearly every month since June of that year, at least until last February.

It’s more obvious when we chart the 3-month moving average over the last 3 years.

It’s pretty obvious that the numbers had been on the rise for nearly a year. That being said, they seemed to have stabilized over the next few months, and even began declining over a 3-month period.

Then we saw a jump in responses we saw over the last 2 months of 2023, which is more than double what we saw in October.

But then January brought in a huge drop in number, at only 3 total drug responses in the entire city. That’s the first time since February 2020 and only the second time since January 2018 that the numbers of drug responses have been in the single digits.

I wouldn’t get my hopes up just yet, however, as the numbers in February and March started climbing again. They’re still lower than they were in December, but March’s numbers were the second highest we”ve seen since the summer.

This might be showing that January’s numbers are just an anomaly, not a declining trend. We’ll have to see what the next few months bring, however, to see if we get anywhere close to the numbers Lethbridge had this time last year.

Now that we have data for March, we can also report on fourth quarter numbers.

Drug responses in the first quarter of 2023 were at their second lowest level of any of the other first quarters since 2018. This drop was driven primarily by January’s low numbers.

Here’s a look at all the months on record.

	2018	2019	2020	2021	2022	2023	2024
Jan	14	25	10	14	40	44	3
Feb	39	17	8	23	41	49	12
Mar	19	13	14	43	17	33	22
Apr	41	12	15	14	12	39
May	38	16	20	28	12	43
Jun	35	20	49	27	21	39
Jul	35	28	56	52	23	44
Aug	24	10	42	49	24	33
Sep	18	16	14	35	21	18
Oct	28	10	15	32	29	12
Nov	28	16	38	43	39	20
Dec	21	13	20	22	28	29

This marks 7 months in a row to fall below 30. In 2022, there were 9 months below 30. We’ll see if these numbers hold up for April.

One thing to keep in mind when reading these statistics is that just because EMS are responding to these drug events doesn’t necessarily mean these were the only drug events.

For example, if more people are carrying naloxone on them or more groups outfitted with naloxone (such as SAGE Clan) are patrolling public areas where people are using drugs, they may attend to overdoses and see such success that EMS is never called.

So, the actual number of drug events occuring in the city last month could have been higher.