Patient care top priority for EMS

I am following up on a recent article about rural ambulance service and would like to assure your readers patient care is always our top priority and we work very hard to ensure the highest quality care is always available whenever a patient needs our help.

Response times throughout southern Alberta have remained steady since Alberta Health Services began delivering EMS care in 2009 and 97 per cent of our patients tell us they are satisfied with their EMS care.

It is true sometimes ambulances from one area may be temporarily relocated to support another. It is important to know this is part of our borderless system that not only ensures the closest ambulance responds when a patient calls for help but it also allows us to ensure communities are never left without emergency coverage.

Our co-ordinated dispatch system knows where every ambulance is and can move resources around to provide additional support.

We do our best to keep local resources in their communities and have been working to reduce the number of non-urgent patient transfers tasked to these ambulances. As an example, we have a small fleet of nonambulance transport (NAT) vehicles, like wheelchair-accessible vans, that we use for non-urgent transports. In the first three months of 2018, our six South Zone NAT vehicles supported almost 900 patient transports. That reduces the need to use ambulances for this type of work. We’re also improving the way we schedule inter-facility transfers which will allow us to better plan these trips at times when we have more available resources so we can keep emergency vehicles available to respond to emergencies.

The time EMS crews spend caring for patients in hospital is longer than we’d like. This is a challenge health-care systems are facing across North America as a result of increased pressure on emergency departments and hospital capacity. Our teams are working closely with our ED partners to find ways to reduce this time so we can return our ambulances to the street and their communities as quickly as possible.

Patient care is constantly evolving which is why we are always reviewing what we do to ensure the care we provide is the care patients deserve and expect.

We are incredibly proud of our paramedics and the care they provide to Albertans every day. They care deeply about their communities and provide compassionate and professional care that is second to none. Darren Sandbeck

Senior Provincial Director and Chief Paramedic