Alberta Health Services has made the decision to cancel its contract with the City of Lethbridge for ambulances to be dispatched from the Lethbridge Public Safety Communication Centre and onto its own dispatch centre, the Southern Communications Centre in Calgary.
Currently, the fire department in Picture Butte Emergency Services has a contract with Alberta Health Services, to provide a basic life support ambulance 24 hours a day for seven days a week, out of its firehall. It is currently operated by Lethbridge, which has a contract with AHS to dispatch ambulances and is therefore affected by the AHS decision.
This change will take place sometime early in the new year, when the Picture Butte Emergency Services will no longer have its ambulance dispatched from Lethbridge, which has been done since 1998.
As a citizen calling 911, you should notice no change. The call will be answered in Lethbridge, since it is still a 911 centre. Lethbridge will still dispatch fire and police resources, for the City of Lethbridge (RCMP is dispatched out of Red Deer). The dispatcher will ask you what the nature of your call is: if you need fire, police or EMS. Upon saying you need an ambulance, your call will be transferred to Calgary and it should be a seamless process.
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For members of rural communities, in this case Picture Butte, the call will be processed in Calgary and from there, they will notify the Picture Butte Emergency Services ambulance. AHS has assured the fire department chief that it won’t be any longer than the current process.
The problem arises when their ambulance needs the assistance of their basic life support fire apparatus, that has trained EMTs and EMRs, which happens for about 80 per cent of their calls.
Those calls will now have to come from Lethbridge, so the call has to be transferred back from Calgary to Lethbridge. The fire dispatcher has to gather all the information the EMS dispatcher has collected from the caller to dispatch the fire truck from Picture Butte to assist their ambulance.
The apprehension regarding this process is that transferring a call between two dispatch centres is going to create a delay. “My biggest concern as the supervisor, the manager of this organization, is that when my staff need that assistance in a timely fashion, that delay is not only going to have an effect on potentially the patient care we’re delivering to the citizen, but it also has an effect on their safety,” said Frank West, fire department chief.
His worry stems from the fact that sometimes when EMS are sent to a call, there is the possibility of encountering a violent situation, which can happen in any number of instances when someone calls 911. They can potentially be put at risk and in those instances, they need the assistance of a police officer immediately, which could potentially be delayed from transferring calls back and forth between centres.
From a patient care delivery perspective, a few extra issues arise. One of them is the fact that firefighters at the fire department in Picture Butte Emergency Services are volunteers.
When that call finally gets transferred, they have to be notified via the dispatch system and then it takes about three to four minutes for them to come from their jobs or their homes, get their gear on and onto the fire truck. Therefore, any delay between the ambulance getting notified and the firefighters getting notified adds to those precious seconds and minutes that it takes for the fire truck to arrive on scene and help out the ambulance crew.
A good example of this issue can be seen when someone is trapped. The ambulance will get dispatched first and might be waiting those extra minutes for the fire crews to arrive. Then, the fire crew has to go through its process of actually getting the patient out and into EMT care in the ambulance, where they can finally receive treatment and get them ready to be transported to the hospital.
In addition to being in a high-risk situation that could potentially mean life or death for a patient, having a call transferred to a centre operated by people who are not familiar with rural areas in southern Alberta might increase the delay even more while callers are trying to explain their location.
This has already been experienced by the Picture Butte Emergency Services crew. “The way it is right now, if the call takers in Lethbridge are handling too many calls already, we are bounced to Calgary. So, we have seen definitely the difference with that from call takers that kind of know the southern Alberta area to the ones that aren’t as familiar with it, just in the difference that we see in our notes and the information we receive,” said Justin Chronik, EMS team lead.
For local dispatchers who have handled those 911 calls for the last 50 years, knowledge of some roads’ unofficial names come as second nature. For example, Highway 520 runs from Barons to Claresholm and the locals call it Starline Road, but there are other examples like pitch-fork road and porcupine corner, which can not be found in any map or GPS.
“In Calgary, they’re not going to have that knowledge and eventually, we will get that knowledge transferred to Calgary, like they will eventually pick it up, it’ll be in their system, but we’re losing that experience that we currently have in Lethbridge,” West added.
Southern Alberta is not the only region affected by the change since remote areas in northern Alberta will be affected as well. The provincial government is trying to find financial efficiencies and therefore, instead of having four dispatch centres in Lethbridge, Calgary, Edmonton and Fort McMurray, it will have only one in Calgary.
