Tackling Emergency Response Delays in Drayton Valley

By Amanda Jeffery, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Drayton Valley and District Free Press

The struggle to keep up with the demand in Alberta’s Health Care System isn’t just affecting people at the hospital.

During the quarterly report to council from Drayton Valley/Brazeau County Fire Services (DVBCFS) on January 21, fire chief Tom Thomson, said that there was one incident in which fire services had to wait 30 minutes for emergency medical services (EMS) to get to the scene.

Fire department Operations Chief Joel Houle says they have always worked well with EMS and have never had an issue with the paramedics. 

“We work well in conjunction with our paramedic partners. We have phenomenal paramedic partners that work out in Drayton Valley,” says Houle. “It’s a system problem, not necessarily a paramedic problem on the roadside that we deal with.”

Fire services respond to a number of calls that can range from false alarms to fires to vehicle collisions, and in some cases they are caring for citizens who have been severely injured. In the case of injury, fire services will wait for EMS to show up to ensure the patients have been properly treated for their injuries or taken to a hospital to see a doctor. 

Houle says that while wait times can sometimes be a bit problematic, firefighters are all trained in first aid with CPR. The fire department also has some medical first responders and one primary care paramedic.

“We do have a range of training, and we rely on everyone to help each other out,” he says. 

There are some nights when wait times can’t be avoided. If there is a large incident or a shortage in staff, it can be a challenge for all emergency services to divide their resources effectively, not just paramedics.

“As the system gets busy, fire services tends to have to step up to fill some of those gaps,” says Houle.

This results in an increased call volume and strain on their resources to bridge the gap when the system is maxed out. Houle says sometimes they are waiting for ambulances and sometimes they are not, and he says there is no consistent pattern. Sometimes EMS will get a call first, and other times fire services will.

“There are some misfires in the system that lead to us having to be on scene for periods of time, waiting for EMS resources to help us out,” says Houle.

One of those misfires is the handoff at the hospital when the paramedics arrive. 

The long emergency department wait times in Alberta are caused by a number of different factors, but the results are the same. Doctors are not seeing patients very quickly, and hospital admittance can take hours.

If paramedics arrive at a hospital with a patient, they are not allowed to leave that patient until they have seen a doctor. This could mean they are waiting at the hospital with their patients for extended periods of time and are unable to respond to other calls.

“It’s a huge system problem, is what it is,” he says. “We just see the back end of it because we’re the ones kind of on the front lines. When the hospitals get busy, EMS is always busy.”

He says there are times when they have to wait a longer period for EMS to respond to a call, and that’s normally because they are coming from a longer distance because the local resources have already been used. He says they might be on calls or waiting at hospitals to hand off the patient.

Houle says delays in EMS arrival are not unique to Drayton Valley and Brazeau County; it’s a province-wide issue. He says he believes that staff shortages, increased wait times at hospitals, and the struggle to get resources where they need to go are problems that the Province is going to have to address at some point.

“[The paramedic staff in Drayton Valley] are a dedicated group and are a really good group for our community,” says Houle. “Not by any stretch of the imagination is what’s occurring out there road staff’s doing or problems. We want to make sure we support them and they support us equally as much when we’re doing fire standbys and stuff like that.”

He says the hope is that the Province has a solution in the near future to help with staffing levels and response times.