Ah, the Health Quality Council of Alberta (HQCA)—the plucky little agency tasked with making healthcare in Alberta less of a hot mess. On paper, they’re the watchdogs of patient care, dutifully reviewing systemic failures and issuing recommendations that are supposed to spark change. In reality? They’re the procrastinating roommate of Alberta’s healthcare system: aware of the overflowing sink but somehow always “too busy” to tackle it. And when it comes to the ongoing implosion of Alberta’s EMS, the HQCA seems more interested in scheduling their intervention for sometime next summer. Bold strategy. Let’s see how that works out for the patients waiting for ambulances that never come.
Here at Wheresmyambulance.com, we’ve tried engaging with the HQCA. You’d think a full-blown crisis in patient care, complete with vanishing paramedics, skyrocketing response times, and entire rural areas left uncovered, might warrant 30 minutes of their attention. Nope. Turns out, a collapsing EMS system doesn’t rate high enough to interrupt their busy schedule of whatever it is they do instead. So, while the HQCA drags its feet, ambulances are parked, hundreds of careers are abandoned, and Alberta’s EMS system continues its road deeper into chaos.
Of course, all this work exposing the EMS crisis—researching, writing, and keeping the lights on—doesn’t run on good intentions alone. If you think our mission to push for accountability and change is worth supporting, feel free to check out our GiveSendGo:https://www.givesendgo.com/GC4M8. A few bucks can go a long way toward amplifying the voices that leadership would rather silence.
We’re not waiting for leisurely timelines or vague promises from agencies that seem allergic to urgency. Someone needs to hold EMS leadership accountable before there’s nothing left to salvage, and it’s certainly not going to be the HQCA or the silent as a tomb EMS Advisory Council. Instead of relying on outside agencies to stumble into action, we’re rolling up our sleeves and sounding the alarm ourselves. EMS is collapsing—fast—and Albertans deserve better than delays, excuses, and a "diary date" for solutions months down the road.
The Health Quality Council of Alberta has added a Paramedic to their Board of Directors. Hooray! The link is here: HQCA Board We thought this might signal new initiatives to solve the many problems of Alberta EMS. We asked to meet with them.
When I met with the HQCA back in 2017 it was around the time I spoke to ACOP asking for a statement supporting: “Hospital ER Hallway Waiting is bad for both Patients and Paramedics”. It was also just before I headed off to PAC in Quebec City to speak on the issue of Holding Paramedics Hostage in Hospital ER and to ask the PAC Board to support the same statement. I presented HQCA with our findings including this.
As a working Paramedic at the time, I was taking a big risk doing all of this. In the end, neither ACOP nor PAC agreed to make any statement supporting an end to hallway waits. I did get called in for a conversation with an EMS manager who received a complaint about postcards I was handing out. The ‘Hallway Nanny’ bit upset some folks. We had a laugh about it later.
10 days after reaching out to the HQCA for that 30-minute presentation, I received this email.
Turns out EMS is so unimportant that they can’t spend 30 minutes talking to WMA about it. HQCA is putting off investigating a full-blown patient care crisis until sometime next year. Meanwhile, ambulances will still be out of service, more Paramedics will abandon their careers while response times and pending events keep vectoring into previously uncharted territory.
Well, we’re not waiting. Here at Where's My Ambulance? we’re not going to sit quietly while EMS 'leadership' tries to spin this or for some outside agency like the HQCA to put it in their diary for future consideration.
Why add a Paramedic to your Board of Directors? When I was an EMS Dispatcher, we sometimes asked Crews to pick up lunch for us. That can’t possibly be what’s happening here.
So now I’m wondering why we haven’t heard a peep from the EMS Advisory Council. We hope this government is working on legislation to give them a mandate to finish dismantling AHS, it needs to be soon. We’re reluctant run scenarios for offload delay + call volume + pending events + non-urgent transfers + response times + staff exodus through an AI program. If that’s something one of our readers might like to attempt, let us know what happens. How can anyone not recognize how quickly AHS EMS is collapsing?
We don’t believe the Health Quality Council of Alberta should wait to salvage EMS for parts next summer. AHS has knowingly used EMS like a donkey cart for years. How many Patients were harmed by long responses tied directly to these problems? Moral injury and exhaustion among Paramedics has contributed to a drop to 60% staffing. Vindictive discipline, EMS Crews timing out hundreds of miles from home, Rural Emergency Ambulances tasked with coverage and transfers outside their communities, 'one day a year' of training, etc.
Perhaps everyone involved needs to watch the Award-Winning CTV Documentary, ‘Broken System, EMS Crisis in Alberta’ every Monday morning in their first meeting. Maybe they’d think about the Patients waiting for EMS Care in the Community for the rest of each week.
The recommendations HQCA made to AHS after the fatal dog attack on Betty Ann Williams were a decent start to solving the EMS Crisis. You can re-read the report yourself here: HQCA Incident Review 2022. Waiting around for HQCA to uncover the whole truth at their leisure seems foolish. Some issues since have caused harm to both Patients and Paramedics. All while EMS leadership holds meetings and tells the public things are improving. Hubris, denial, willful blindness, incompetence... Any one or all four, it doesn't matter.
We need someone to hold EMS leaders accountable. After 15 years of tolerating this nonsense, working with great Paramedics, MLAs, Journalists, Citizen Action Groups, Town and County Councils we’ve realized change won’t happen unless it comes from the top.
These first few posts and pages of data are just us warming up. We're going to keep sounding an alarm on this until EMS is fixed. We'll continue speaking publicly because the working Paramedics can’t say anything. We're getting good information from inside EMS now, from every department and at every level. If you're reading this then you can help, just drop a couple of bucks in our give-send-go. Albertans can’t just continue coasting along, ignoring the root causes of this EMS CRISIS and pretending there are leaders or outside agencies in place that can do anything to correct course.
We’ll keep shouting the truth because working paramedics can’t, and someone has to hold the line while AHS pretends everything is fine. Every ambulance parked out of service, every patient left waiting too long, every paramedic forced out of their career—it all deserves to be brought to light.
If you want to help us keep doing this, take a look at our GiveSendGo: https://www.givesendgo.com/GC4M8. Whether you donate, follow our instagram, share our posts, or simply keep reading, you’re helping us fight for the paramedics and patients who’ve been let down for far too long. Together, we can push for the change Alberta’s EMS system so desperately needs—no procrastinating allowed.
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