More rural emergency workers needed to meet 911 call demand

More boots on the ground are needed as many emergency service organizations in Manitoba and Saskatchewan agree there are too few ambulance staff for the high number of emergency calls and kilometres travelled.

According to Saskatchewan Health Authority documents obtained by the NDP, there were 1,132 instances of code NAA (no local ambulance available) recorded from Feb.14 to Oct. 2, 2023.

Most cases occurred in rural areas.

Regina reported 323 instances, Cut Knife 76, La Loche 70, Meadow Lake 58, and Buffalo Narrows 56. These documents exclude Saskatoon and other communities with different ambulance providers.

There is a significant shortage of paramedics nationwide, with Saskatchewan facing 150 vacant paramedic EMS positions, excluding those in fire services or private companies.

Meanwhile, in Manitoba, vacancies in rural areas have tripled since 2020, and ambulance response times have increased by roughly 30 percent since 2018.

In Saskatchewan, if you call 911, a dispatcher may tell you that an ambulance could take at least an hour, maybe more, to arrive.

The province’s paramedics travelled 11,789,634 km in the 2022-23 fiscal year with over 181,006 calls through 911 requiring an ambulance, said Steven Skoworodkov, who owns Wakaw and District Emergency Services. That is an average of 496 calls a day.

This is a concerning increase compared to the 470 daily calls reported as of November 2022, especially for small departments, where a busy night with limited crew, equipment, and vehicles could mean no one is available to answer a call.

Working in the Wakaw area for nearly his entire 27-year career, except for one year in Nipawin, Skoworodkov says calls to his ambulance business have increased every year by about 15 to 20 per cent for the last three years, and people and resources keep getting stretched thinner and thinner. Members of his team also pull double duty as volunteer firefighters.

At just under 1,000 people in Wakaw and more in the surrounding area, the community also lies at the intersection of Hwy 2 and Hwy 41, connecting Wakaw to Melfort, Saskatoon, Prince Albert, and Regina, making both very busy highways. 

Overcrowded emergency rooms cannot relieve overworked paramedics, who are unable to discharge patients until a bed becomes available, sometimes for up to eight hours, according to internal EMS logs released this fall.

In some extreme cases, ambulance crews have had to wait up to 26 hours before patients are placed in an ER bed.

The occasional intermittent closures of rural emergency rooms in Manitoba and Saskatchewan have meant patients sometimes have to be taken farther down the road for care.

According to Freedom of Information requests filed by the NDP, 407 “distinct closures” of emergency rooms across the province have occurred since 2019.

In early 2023, the Galloway Health Centre in Oxbow, Sask., experienced at least a dozen emergency department closures over several weeks.

Even big Prairie cities aren’t immune from ER disruptions. Earlier this year, the emergency room at Saskatoon City Hospital experienced a partial closure and some patients were rerouted to other area hospitals.