If only it could be Merry Christmas from AHS EMS! But, you didn’t get the memo? Turns out, holiday magic is best left to the pros—because when it comes to staffing, AHS EMS isn’t delivering the goods. Despite the predictable chaos of Christmas and the promise of double-time pay to staff, AHS dropped the ball. But hey, what’s new? They do it every year now.
If they were any more predictable, they’d be the punchline to a bad holiday special.
The stats? Abysmal. Over 16% short on staffing across Edmonton? Check. The Great Red Alert Disappearing Act? Of course. And those poor folks in Calgary? They might be 1% better off than Edmonton staffing wise (big whoop), but with over 1,500 people left hanging in the pending call log, we can’t help but wonder if AHS EMS management even knows what competent leadership looks like. Do they teach that in Health Care Leadership?
But here's where YOU come in—because every donation to our GiveSendGo (https://www.givesendgo.com/GC4M8) fuels this fight. Every single dollar helps us keep holding AHS EMS accountable, and if there’s one thing management hates, it’s the truth getting out. So donate, get involved, and let’s make sure AHS EMS can’t hide behind their failures anymore. Oh, and stay tuned—we’ve got new communities to expose in the coming weeks, and trust us, they’re about to get some serious attention.
There are plenty of unpredictable things in public safety—a multi-car pileup, a natural disaster, a wildfire. You get the idea. These are the kinds of crises you can only prepare for so much because the what, when, where, why, and how are all giant question marks.
Then there are the things you can prepare for. Take, for instance, the Christmas holidays. Like clockwork, they roll around at the end of December, bringing two certainties: 1) It will be busy, and 2) Staffing plans can be made weeks, months—hell, even years in advance. What more could a leadership team ask for? If they’re competent, proactive, and not universally despised by their staff, they’ll rise to the occasion. If they’re AHS EMS management, they’ll fumble it like a greased-up turkey fresh out of the oven. Again. For the umpteenth year in a row.
Now, since we haven’t really hammered on Edmonton.... yet..... What better place to kick off this year’s Holiday Train Wreck Report™?
Even with casuals and overtime bribes tossed into the mix, staffing levels in Edmonton managed to be a glorious 16% short over the holidays. Between December 20th and 31st, AHS EMS funded 19,947 paramedic hours in the city but could only staff 16,945 of them. For those unfamiliar with basic arithmetic, that’s really, really bad.
And it gets worse.
Christmas Eve? 82% staffed. Christmas Day? 81% staffed. While paying double time! Boxing Day, somehow the overachiever of the bunch, barely scraped out 87% at time-and-a-half. And New Year’s Eve—the grand finale of holiday mayhem? 83%.
So what’s the takeaway? In Edmonton—just like the rest of Alberta—the people in charge are toxic, inept, and have obliterated whatever shred of trust the workforce used to have in their leadership. The reasons? Numerous. The results? You’re looking at them.
But dear reader! Edmonton—and AHS EMS as a whole—deserves a standing ovation! Why? Because they miraculously brought their Red Alerts down to just three!
That’s right, folks—the Great Red Alert Disappearing Act! 🎩✨
Step one: Quietly rewrite the rules so it’s damn near impossible to hit Red Alert.
Step two: Pat yourself on the back for your manufactured success.
Step three: Expect everyone to believe you're a genius instead of a fraud.
Bravo, AHS EMS. Truly, an inspiration to smug gaslighters everywhere.
Paramedics, however, know this is utter nonsense. Why? Because we can also see the Orange Alerts—that charming little state where, say, a fatal dog bite won’t get dispatched until more ambulances magically appear.
So, between December 20th and 31st, Edmonton racked up 711 Orange Alerts, resulting in 699 calls for help that weren’t immediately dispatched. Let that sink in. Nearly 700 people dialed 911 for an emergency and got put on hold like they were calling their internet provider.
But hey, at least we can count on AHS EMS “leadership’s” unwavering faith in the MPDS dispatch system, right? You know, the same system their own research admits is a terrible predictor of actual patient condition. https://r.pebmac.ca/https://www.canadianparamedicineresearch.ca/current-9-1-1-call-taking-practice-shows-poor-performance-for-predicting-clinical-outcomes-in-two-large-emergency-medical-services-datasets?fbclid=IwY2xjawIQkghleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHfadImEwnyquB0Fk7CkJ9qwEHz9fNsEaP3NATaNbGG8S8QfdFl5aVMVwAg_aem_OauCzKfyl10i4BxghZVHaA
Yes, you read that correctly—they know it’s garbage and still use it. Because leadership..... Their pieces of paper from Royal Roads University says so!
And finally—perhaps the most concerning trend of them all. The clearest sign that AHS EMS isn’t just failing—it’s doubling down on failure and calling it a success.
Let’s talk about flexing—you know, that brilliant strategy where ambulances are yanked out of their home communities to cover Edmonton instead. It happened 173 times over the holidays. Because stealing from Peter to pay Paul is apparently a core operating principle at AHS EMS.
An emergency in Sherwood Park? Meh, not nearly as concerning as one in downtown Edmonton. After all, it’s not like Sherwood Park residents pay taxes for their own emergency coverage or anything. Nope—better to strip their resources and hope for the best.
But don’t worry, AHS EMS will surely congratulate itself on this “strategic deployment.” Because in their world, fixing the problem is optional—but making it look fixed? That’s mandatory.
Let’s head north and take a look at how Grande Prairie fared.
We’ll be honest—this one took a bit more digging. At first, the numbers didn’t quite add up. But then we circled back to some leaked data (shoutout to our North Zone post for that one). A concerned supervisor—clearly fed up with the nonsense—slipped us a few key pieces of info that finally helped make sense of this mess.
So, here’s the deal: 1,561 paramedic hours were actually staffed in Grande Prairie. But AHS EMS had funded 1,872 hours. And somehow, that stacked up to 83% staffing—which left us scratching our heads.
Now, onto the highlight reel of failure:
Christmas Eve: 88% (not terrible, but still short)
Christmas Day: 58% (oh. Oh no.)
Boxing Day: 83%
New Year’s Eve: 83%
Bonus disaster—December 30th: 75%
So, while Edmonton was busy stealing ambulances from surrounding communities, Grande Prairie was apparently running a holiday staffing experiment called "How Low Can We Go?"
So, what did we uncover from the leaked data?
For starters—ambulances staffed with EMRs. Now, let’s be clear—this isn’t a jab at EMRs themselves. They do exactly what they’re trained to do. But when an ambulance is supposed to be staffed with a PCP and an ACP, swapping in an EMR is like replacing your pilot with a guy who’s really good at flight simulators. It’s just not the same.
And then there’s the preplanned relocations—because why just fail when you can fail strategically? Well-staffed communities like Grande Prairie were drained dry, their ambulances sent to cover areas that had already been bled of resources. Why? Because they just don’t have the staff.
So, instead of fixing the problem, AHS EMS just shuffled the pieces around the board and called it a day. A bold move, really—if only patients could relocate their emergencies to wherever the ambulances ended up.
And last but not least—Calgary.
How did our neck of the woods handle staffing? Well, brace yourselves for this triumph:
A full 1% better than Edmonton.
That’s right—85%! Take that, Edmonton. Big numbers, ladies and gentlemen! Surely, this is the kind of excellence that AHS EMS leadership will pat themselves on the back for a press release if anyone would actually care, or if they were at least honest with them.
Because, hey—when the bar is on the floor, tripping slightly less than the next guy is a win!
Let’s grab a microscope and take a closer look at some of these stellar staffing numbers, shall we?
Christmas Eve: 77% (Ho ho ho… nope.)
Christmas Day: 83%—even with double-time pay! (Incredible. Just incredible.)
Boxing Day: AHS EMS “leadership” must be beaming—88%! (Practically a standing ovation compared to the rest.)
New Year’s Eve: 81%. (What better way to ring in the new year than short-staffed?)
With numbers like these, it really drives home why Alberta’s paramedics joke that to be a “leader” in AHS EMS, you don’t actually need to be a great leader—you just need a piece of paper that says you are.
Nothing screams competence quite like consistently failing at the same thing, year after year, while pretending it’s an improvement.
So how about those Red Alerts, lets look at those in Calgary. Oh hey! Only 3!
Just like in Edmonton, the devil is in the details, isn’t it?
Time to count up the Orange Alerts—because what’s the holiday season without a little catastrophic system failure? Between December 20th and December 31st, Calgary clocked in at a grand total of 1,210 Orange Alerts. That’s 499 more than Edmonton managed to rack up.
Ouff… Remember how we just joked that Calgary could celebrate being 1% better than Edmonton? Yeah… about that. Great job, “Leadership.” Truly inspiring.
Let’s check those Pending Events, shall we? How many patients in Calgary were left waiting, wondering if an ambulance would ever show up? Well, if Edmonton had 699 pending EMS calls, you’d think Calgary—being a similarly sized city—would be in the same ballpark, right? Wrong!
Calgary absolutely smashed that number. 1,510 people were dumped into the pending call log—a whopping 811 more than Edmonton. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Or, if you work in AHS EMS leadership, it probably just makes you craft some good old fashion damage control about how everything is fine.
Well, at least one thing we can glean is that there is a huge disparity between Calgary and Edmonton's flexes, and that being that in Edmonton Zone, AHS offloads more of the burden for the blunders of Edmonton Metro onto rural and suburban areas. Funny enough, this isn’t a new problem—it’s been years in the making. The 2009 transition of EMS to provincial control set the stage for this exact kind of disaster. You remember when AHS promised that consolidating dispatch services into a few big hubs would lead to more efficient resource use? Well, fast forward to today, and rural communities are still left holding the bag as their resources get drained to prop up the bigger urban centers. You’d think that after more than a decade, they'd figure out that rural residents deserve better than to be emergency service pawns in Edmonton’s staffing strategy. But here we are, still waiting for AHS to actually fix the mess they've made... just as they promised they'd do back in 2009.
So, there you have it. AHS EMS has once again failed to deliver during a season that’s as predictable as the turkey leftovers. Whether it's disastrous staffing shortages, shifting ambulances like pieces on a chessboard, or pretending that their broken system is somehow a success, the only thing they’re consistently good at is letting the public down. But don't worry, we're here to shine a light on it all, and we’re not stopping anytime soon.
If you’re as tired of this circus as we are, donate to our GiveSendGo and help fuel our fight for change. Every dollar sends a message to AHS management that their incompetence won’t go unnoticed—and it lets us continue exposing their failures for all to see. Your support keeps the pressure on, and trust us, management is already feeling it.
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