On December 21st 2022 the government of Alberta made public a plan to reduce the number of acute care Ambulances transporting patients that have no clinical need. The story was reported far and wide, here it is being reported by the CTV: https://calgary.ctvnews.ca/alberta-plans-to-improve-ems-response-times-by-diverting-non-emergency-transports-1.6203898
The story simply states that the end result should be a decrease of about 15% of transfer volumes, and that there will be a decreased burden on Emergency Ambulances. Over a year later lets examine how it's going.
Examining the transfer burden of Rural facilities around Calgary there should be a demonstrable decrease in the number of transfers from 2022 to 2023 with the program in place, problem is no such trend presents itself. Often there is no noted decrease, worse, some facilities increased their number of transfers rather completed by EMS resources. Another FOIP request was made asking for how many transfers were done throughout the rural area of the Calgary zone by Emergency Ambulances and this was the information that AHS provided:
On a radio show titled your province your p a question was asked directly of Danielle Smith about non-urgent transfers and this is what she had to say:
“Hi Premier Smith, Brian here.
I'm the chair of the Cochrane EMS crisis Community Action Group. I have a comment and then I have a question.
First of all Premier, I want to thank you for what you're doing to Alberta Health, the dismantling of this organization. You're taking the bull by the horns and we as Albertans say you're on the right track.
I want to remind you that today March 9 is the first anniversary when the Inter-Facility Transfer RFP was made public to private operators to help with the over 125,000 annual inter facility transfers.
Where are we with this RFP?
In 2023 EMS non emergency transfers in the suburban rural area around Calgary conducted by Emergency Ambulances, not including Ambulances working (based) in Calgary conducted 1178 transfers between these facilities, sometimes leaving the small communities without an Ambulance, this is according to our freedom of information requests.
My question:
What would you say to a Mayor of these suburban rural Communities around Calgary, saying that enough is enough!
That as of a certain date, say April 9, our emergency ambulances are protecting our community and will no longer be flexed or conduct non emergency transfers? Thank you.”
(Premier Smith)
“Well, I agree and then that's why we set up the non ambulance transfers and then the first few months, I think we'd already had 4000 trips that we had done with 166 different vendors.
I'm not sure why we don't have a vendor in Cochrane yet, but let me just put it out there;
If there's a vendor in Cochrane who wants to do non ambulance transfers, let our Health Minister know, because we are moving the procurement and contracting to the department now so that the Health Minister has more direct oversight of that.
It’s not going to be an AHS decision.
So I would just put it out there. I know you've called in before. I'm not sure why there's a hole in Cochrane because we've been able to successfully have these kinds of programs elsewhere.”
(Moderator)
“Don texted in from Calgary Currie asking very similar questions.
He said Why is AHS stalling and rejecting these qualified paramedical services from helping Albertans get to these appointments?”
(Premier Smith)
“Well, then I would just say that one of the issues that we've had is that we've realized that Alberta Health Services needs to orient on what their prime business is, which is Alberta hospital services.
Question is why is this the case? Why did AHS stop using these vendors, and did those vendors ever even make it into Rural settings? An overview of the data suggests no.
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