Of late there has been a new phenomenon occurring which needs a bit of explanation. Citizens of Powell River may have noticed ambulances having to pull over to let a fire trucks with lights and sirens go past; the reasons for this are a bit strange.
The powers that be have determined it is far better to get a five-ton fire truck with lesser-trained people to a medical scene faster than it is to have an ambulance with trained paramedics onboard. The reason for this would appear to be that the vastly under-resourced BC Ambulance Service cannot meet national standards for response times at a satisfactory level.
Rather than address the problem of a lack of resources, the government has chosen instead to downgrade many emergency calls to non-emergency, stating in essence they can take as long as they want to get to a patient.
These same powers will say they studied the matter and concluded ambulances were being sent in emergency mode incorrectly in many cases and it compromised safety of the public and ambulance crews, and they would be right in many cases.
But this is more a problem with the dispatch system, which has been implemented so the call takers can be hired off the street and not be trained paramedics anymore.
They also ignore the fact that a huge fire truck racing through crowded city streets might be unsafe as well, but that apparently doesn’t matter. The main thing is they can ignore national standards and not have to address the underlying issue that has plagued the ambulance service for years, mainly government neglect. This dovetails nicely into the larger plan of downloading ambulance costs to the municipalities.
At one time, BC had one of the highest trained and most efficient ambulance service in the world. We had representatives from services all over the world come to see how it was operated.
Over the years funding has not kept up with costs, staff has been lost and the system became more and more ineffective. When the current government came to power they decided, in the push to privatize everything, to dramatically downgrade the service and foist costs more and more on the towns and cities. The only vehicle available for this were fire departments that, coincidently, were in danger of downsizing due to less fires in the community.
They hold Seattle Fire Department’s Medic One Program as a model of a fire-based EMS system, but they do not indicate that the cost to service Seattle is twice as much as BC Ambulance Service for the entire province, including BC Air Ambulance. The move to a fire-based EMS system would be terribly expensive and create response area boundaries that would compromise patient care.
Cameron Bailey has lived in Powell River for eight years and has worked as a paramedic for 26 years.
