Alberta to divert non-urgent 911 calls to ease pressure on EMS

In an effort to address the pressures on EMS, Alberta Health Services says non-urgent calls will be diverted to a Health Link nurse to free up ambulances.

The process will reportedly avoid the need to unnecessarily dispatch ambulances, freeing up those resources for more urgent calls.

“Everyone will have access to the appropriate level of care they need when they need it. The new approach makes our EMS system more responsive to the needs of Albertans,” Minister of Health Jason Copping said Thursday.

This comes as the province continues to face major challenges when it comes to EMS response times.

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The province says people who call 911 for a medical situation within Alberta will be connected with an EMS communications officer. The call evaluator will assess the call and dispatch an ambulance as soon as possible.

“Callers who are assessed through this very careful, objective process in EMS who are assessed as not serious and not urgent and do not need an ambulance response are then directly connected to the registered nurses in our 811 Health Link centre. The ambulance response is then called off, thus freeing up the ambulance to be available, along with its crew, for other emergencies,” explained Dr John Cowell, an official administrator of Alberta Health Services.

Alberta Health Services likens the process to what happens when you enter a hospital emergency department. It notes that when a call is transferred to a nurse, that health care provider will then determine the appropriate next steps.

The authority adds “911 calls that are assessed as clinically appropriate for the new shared response system do not wait in the regular 811 queue.” It explains that at any point that it’s determined an ambulance is required, one will be dispatched.

Depending on the area, non-urgent calls account for up to 20 per cent of 911’s volume, AHS says. It anticipates the new EMS-811 Shared Response Team will help avoid about 40,000 non-emergency responses every year.

“We are acting on the solutions and ideas EMS workers brought forward to better manage non-urgent calls and find ways to provide the appropriate level of care for Albertans,” explained RJ Sigurdson, parliamentary secretary for EMS reforms.

“Transferring non-urgent calls will help ease the strain on EMS front-line workers and help focus their efforts on the most urgent calls, where their level of care is needed.”

NDP says UCP not doing enough to address EMS challenges

Meanwhile, the Alberta NDP continues to slam the UCP over EMS challenges, saying the latest announcement doesn’t go far enough to address concerns.

“It is so disappointing to witness the UCP, yet again, ignore real solutions presented from frontline EMS workers to address the ambulance crisis. The UCP keeps tinkering around the edges rather than hiring and retaining Alberta paramedics and frontline EMS workers,” a statement from the New Democrats’ health critic, David Shepherd, reads.

“The requests from paramedics are clear-crews must get off-shift on time, all paramedics must be offered a permanent full-time contract, and harm-reduction services need to expand to cut down the huge number of drug poisoning calls.”

The NDP goes on to say that the lack of paramedics at the news conference Thursday “speaks volumes to … their adversarial relationship with front-line health-care workers.”