A survey of emergency medical professionals employed by Alberta Health Services reveals ambulance workers are plagued by low morale overwork and insufficient resources. The survey released September 25 was conducted by the Health Sciences Association of Alberta (HSAA). It includes anonymous written responses from participants that complain of poor relations between front-line workers and upper management and pervasive problems with the length of time paramedics must wait with patients before a hospital is able to admit them.
“Due to these ever-increasing wait times there are fewer and fewer units on the roads. This leads to lengthy response times ultimately putting our patients at risk for adverse outcomes” writes one respondent.
“No real progress has been made in this area despite repeated promises. If the wait times were improved the resources would be largely sufficient” another adds.
In the survey 81 per cent of respondents say morale is worse across Alberta than it was in 2012.
In the metro Calgary area 59 per cent of respondents say their ability to take breaks has deteriorated over the past two years 62 per cent say the time they spend waiting to drop patients off at hospitals has increased and 81 per cent say the number of ambulances on the road has not kept up with population growth. Of the union’s 2415 EMS members 556 responded to the questionnaire.
EMS staff were asked if conditions are better or worse than they were in 2012 because that is the year the HSAA conducted a similar survey of ambulance workers.
“Some areas are worse than others but everybody is saying that things are generally worse than they were two years ago and two years ago things weren’t very good” says HSAA president Elisabeth Ballermann.
“I was looking at the news release that we sent out two years ago and I felt a little like I could change the dates on this and it’s the same issue except the members are perceiving that it has got worse” she adds.
Following the 2012 survey then health minister Fred Horne asked the Health Quality Council to investigate. Its 2013 report confirmed what front-line emergency staff were saying but Ballermann says efforts since then to fix the problems “petered out.”
A Grande Prairie emergency service worker who asked to remain anonymous also says conditions did not get better after 2012.
“There have definitely not been any improvements since. In fact even with the city population growing considerably last month AHS decided to get rid of two ambulances within the city…. I get to see my wife [who is also an EMT] leave on night shifts dreading the evening to come because on night shifts there are only two ambulances to cover the entire city plus the surrounding county areas. This leaves crews running calls back to back all night barely giving them time to get a meal in. It is quite sad to see how terrible our medical system has become” he says.
Bruce Conway AHS spokesman for Calgary says the province has been working to address ambulance workers’ concerns meeting directly with front-line staff to discuss their issues and creating a staff engagement workforce team.
Conway says in April of this year the province appointed Darren Sandbeck the former executive director of Calgary and Central Zone EMS to the position of chief paramedic in order to lead the development of a positive work environment in Alberta’s emergency services. Sandbeck raised the ire of ambulance workers following the 2012 survey when he contradicted that survey’s responses and told Fast Forward Weekly ambulance services had not deteriorated since the AHS takeover and that the service was “on the right path.”
Alberta Liberal Party Leader Raj Sherman says the province is ignoring the cause of EMS’s morale issues and deteriorating service. Sherman who is also a practicing ER doctor says the province’s refusal to dramatically increase long-term care resources is at the heart of many of the health system’s problems.
Sherman and Ballermann both say the provincial government has been told repeatedly since the 1990s that without long-term care resources people who should not be in hospitals but cannot live independently are off-loaded in hospitals preventing patients that do need to be hospitalized from being admitted in a timely manner.
“The government has to invest more money in the system number 1 to prevent people from coming into the system to begin with and once they come in so we can actually get them back out” says Sherman. “We need to stop privatizing all this stuff… [because] companies can’t make money with high-needs low-income Albertans so they just bring them to the hospital.”
Ballermann does say that while most survey participants paint a bleak picture those in Alberta’s Suburban Rural North Zone had more favourable views of their working conditions and relationships with management.
There she says “management has made real efforts to listen to the concerns of our members and the impact of those measures comes out loud and clear in the survey results…. It goes to show what genuine concern and attention can do to mitigate the issues that front-line workers identify rather than making excuses.”
