‘Are you ready to go back? There’s more calls waiting’: Alberta EMS workers are burnt out, paramedic says

It was back to work and school Monday for many Calgarians after a restful holiday, but that wasn’t the case for many local paramedics who have been burning the candle at both ends, and don’t see an end in sight.

From red alerts to staffing shortages and ambulance wait times, the ongoing EMS crisis across the province has both patients and paramedics feeling frustrated.

Primary Care Paramedic Ryan Middleton says EMS workers are exasperated, and are struggling mentally, and physically with their high stress jobs.

“We lost over 300 individual bodies from the work pool in the Calgary zone, that’s not even provincially. When the number of staff you’re dealing with — that’s close to eight per cent of people — just decide to hang up their uniform and do something else so that they could spend Christmas and birthdays with family,” he told CityNews. “They don’t have to worry about career-ending injuries.”

In the Calgary zone, 64 vacant shifts were highlighted on Christmas Day followed by another 53 on New Year’s Eve.

But, Middleton says these aren’t new challenges.

He adds that at this time last year, an industry record was set locally — but not in a good way.

“We were doing 99 per cent utilization sustained for weeks at a time. That means in a 12 hour shift, you have eight individual minutes that you are not responding to an emergency, transporting a patient, in a hallway, or being moved between stations for deployment coverage,” Middleton explained.

Middleton gathers data on the province’s EMS situation through Freedom of Information and Privacy Act requests.

“I don’t know any other jobs where you may have to go to work and encircle your hands around the torso of an infant trying to revive them, and you’re only earning three dollars more an hour than you were eight years ago when you had to do it for the first time, keep someone alive long enough to get to a hospital, explain to someone in the emergency department that the person in the same car has been decapitated and then you have two minutes to find coffee and a washroom before you’re being asked on a cellphone, ‘Are you ready to go back? There’s more calls waiting,'” he said.

He does this as a patient advocate, not as an employee of Alberta Health Services.

The paramedic says the compensation for positions in his field doesn’t match the high stress of the job, and typically EMS workers quit after about eight years.