Hallway waits hit EMS response times, survey says
Liberals seek intermediary workers to care for patients and free up paramedics
Emergency Medical Services employees in Alberta say more can be done to cut down on patient transfers, hallway wait times and ambulance “red alerts.”
The Liberals conducted an anonymous survey of Alberta paramedics this summer. Gary Bobrovitz, spokesman for the party, said copies of the survey were given to the EMS union for distribution to members.
David Khan, Liberal party leader, shared the survey results with EMS workers and Calgarians at a panel on Thursday. Panel members included representatives from Alberta’s EMS union.
The survey findings helped the party draft recommendations to the NDP, calling on the province to reduce EMS worker overtime hours, lengthy waits for patient handover in hospitals and increased funding for the community paramedic program.
“The most critical issue is not having crews to respond to 911 calls, and that’s directly caused by them sitting in the hallways waiting for their patients,” Khan said on Friday.
Over 100 EMS staff responded to the survey anonymously to avoid workplace repercussions, the Liberal party said.
The survey summary shows 57.3 per cent of those surveyed believe hallway wait times have increased since they had begun working for EMS. Another 28.2 per cent of respondents believed the wait times were unchanged, with only 9.7 per cent believing wait times have gone down.
The Liberals’ data showed paramedics spent more than 650,000 hours in 2016 waiting to transfer care of patients to hospital staff.
That same year, EMS staff also clocked more than 135,000 hours of overtime for an estimated $10 million in additional wages at the taxpayers’ expense.
In the survey, EMS workers identified long hallway waits for patient hand over “as a source of delayed response times” which are “impacting the quality of care they were able to deliver.”
Workers also said the long waits have “led to red alerts that have forced ambulances out of surrounding areas to cover the Calgary region.”
Khan said the quickest and simplest way to decrease hallway waits is for the province to hire “intermediary health-care workers” tasked with caring for patients brought in by EMS crews until they can be admitted to the ER.
“We know that it’s going to take more resources and more money and time to restructure these emergency rooms and hospitals to better deal with the volume, but in the interim, the hallway waits could be overseen by these intermediary health-care providers,” Khan said.
The Liberals said EMS workers identified a lack of beds, a lack of communication between facilities and patients who don’t require emergency care calling 911 as contributing factors for the long waits.
As far as solutions, workers surveyed said more fast-track zones, intermediary health-care workers and more long-term care options to free up beds could cut down on wait times and take pressure off front-line hospital staff.
The province increased funding for EMS by $23 million in its 2018 budget and has “committed to creating 2,000 long-term and dementia care spaces by 2019,” Health Minister Sarah Hoffman said in a statement.
Khan called those funds a “BandAid measure, and that’s not going to solve the problem” with overtime hours and hallway waits.
In addition to the survey, the Liberals also set up a hotline this summer for EMS workers and citizens to anonymously report their EMS concerns.
Hoffman criticized the hotline for “directing patient and frontline feedback” away from AHS’s feedback line “and toward their own political party.”
But Khan said the Liberals started the hotline because EMS workers were “uncomfortable” raising their concerns through official channels. “It’s a very dismissive attitude from Minister Hoffman … it’s pretty rich that they’re accusing us of that.”
Albertans with EMS feedback should contact the AHS Patient Feedback team by calling 1-855550-2555.