BC union President Troy Clifford says cuts to ambulance service in Kelowna will negatively impact remote communities. Demand for ambulance service in the Central Okanagan may be increasing, but that hasn’t stopped BC Emergency Health Services from reducing services in Kelowna. Last week, in an unannounced move, the agency quietly reduced the number of available ambulances in the city to seven from 10. And that’s expected to have an even bigger ripple across the region, says the association that represents ambulance paramedics in B.C. . “This is a big issue,” said Troy Clifford, BC Ambulance Paramedics and Emergency Dispatchers provincial president. He said Kelowna is not alone in losing ambulance service in the province and as ambulances from outlying areas are used to help meet demand in larger centres, service to smaller surrounding communities such as Lake Country, West Kelowna and Peachland will also be adversely affected. . The three ambulances that were cut were added in 2019 as part-time resources, part of the province’s plan to add more ambulance services to rural, remote and Indigenous communities. But an agreement in September between BCEHS and the paramedic association brought 25 of the 55 ambulances added in 2019 to full employment. Some of the areas that benefited were Penticton, Salmon Arm, Oliver, Ashcroft, Chase and Merritt. Clifford said a second round of negotiations to try to add the remaining 30 full-time ambulances in 2019 — some in larger communities like Kelowna and Kamloops — was scheduled to take place in October. But he said BCEHS “did nothing.” “We’ve been asking for weeks about this,” he said. Lake Country Ambulance Station Chief and union executive Keith Taylor said paramedics in the area found out about Kelowna’s cut when the staffing of the three ambulances was not scheduled for November. Castanet reached out to BCEHS for comment and was initially told a response would be given Thursday, but no explanation for the cuts had been received as of late Friday. According to data posted by the ambulance service on its website, call volume in Kelowna has steadily increased from 19,752 calls in 2018 to 20,012 calls in 2020 and then increased to 23,505 in 2021. Taylor said on average, call volume increases every time by 6% in every community in BC He said the ripple effect of cuts like those in Kelowna doesn’t just affect service to the public, it also has an impact on paramedics. They are not only concerned that they cannot respond in time, but also that in order to cover other areas that need ambulance service, their communities are often left without adequate coverage. “We see a lot of mental health issues with our members as a result of this.” Taylor gave a recent local example where a single ambulance crew was dispatched to 17 different “events” during a 12-hour shift, but only made it to 12 of them. In another case, firefighters acting as first responders had to wait more than an hour with a patient — a teenager who was hit by a passing vehicle while riding his bicycle — for an ambulance to arrive. “We’re very thin when it comes to resources,” Taylor said. Clifford said that with demand increasing and the public already having to wait longer for ambulances to arrive, he feared waits could get longer and in some cases ambulances might not arrive at all, leading to “tragic” results. In addition to ambulances stationed in outlying communities such as West Kelowna, Peachland and Lake Country being used to fill in if needed in Kelowna, transporting patients between hospitals in Penticton, Vernon and the Kootenays is another issue. These missions take ambulances away from their communities for long periods during the day. Taylor wants to see dedicated patient transport ambulances here. Paramedic recruitment and retention are also major issues right now, according to Clifford, but he hopes a recent change in the pay model for on-call paramedics, significantly increasing their hourly rate, will help. In Kelowna’s case, the decommissioned ambulances were staffed by on-call paramedics working full-time shifts. The association estimates another 1,000 paramedics are needed across B.C. just to meet current demand. There are currently 4,500 paramedics in BCAS. “What’s happening now is a recipe for disaster,” he said. “It’s a dire situation and there’s a need for more full-time resources.”
