First all-female paramedic crew hits the streets in Prince Albert
Parkland Ambulance veteran says more women taking interest in the profession
After nearly five decades, history was made last month by seven members of Prince Albert’s Parkland Ambulance.
For the first time in the organization’s 45 years, on Feb. 21 both bases boasted an all-woman street crew: Sherri Morrison, Brooke Mcinnes, Danielle Bolduc, Cory Kulcheski, Jessica Berquist, Eden Shirley and Erica Hnidek.
“We’re all very strong paramedics. We’ve got our strong personalities and we carry our jobs well,” Mcinnes said.
Mcinnes has been Parkland Ambulance for the last eight years. She said in that time she has seen more women become interested in the profession.
“Absolutely it’s good. It’s starting to become more equal now,” she said. “Today’s crew is very powerful.”
In addition to paramedics on staff, Mcinnes said she is seeing more interest at the grassroots level. Mcinnes said she has had a few strong female students and she’s recognizing more interest from women at job fairs.
“Even when we do career fairs we get a lot of females and they look up to you,” she said.
“When they see you in positions like this they realize that, ‘Hey, we can do this as well.’”
Parkland Ambulance director of public affairs Lyle Karasiuk said the recent milestone is “awesome.”
“We have steadily seen an increase in females in our organization,” he said.
“It has been for so many years a male-dominated profession because they (historically) said women couldn’t do it.”
While those attitudes are changing, they haven’t totally disappeared.
“We still get some older men, predominantly older men, saying ‘She’s not going to be able to lift me.’ And my response, if I have a female partner, is: ‘Just watch her, she could probably lift both of us,’” Karasiuk said.
“We have some great female leaders in our organization and we continue to excel in all of our paramedic levels with females.”
Mcinnes acknowledged that she still encounters those misperceptions.
“There’s always been that very strong masculine type. It’s starting to change but it’s something that’s going to take time,” she said.
“(We are) starting to see positive changes in our workforce.”
A similar historical note was made last August, when for the first time in 73 years an all-female Saskatchewan Air Ambulance crew — Carly St. Onge, Tamara Kulyk, Jen Rondeau and Crystal Lybeck — flew together. St. Onge, a pilot with Saskatchewan Air Ambulance for three years, said in August that she knew she would be flying with Kulyk — her co-pilot — but it was a complete shock to the four of them when they showed up and saw it would be an all-female team.
“It seemed like we were setting a good example,” Kulyk said. “(It’s) showing, especially for the aviation world, that women are just as much a part of it and we need more women in the industry.”