EMS Situation
I thought I’d try to lay out what’s going on with EMS in our county. I made this as a comment but thought it could be its own thread.
To jump in here as someone with some context.
Right now, EHS (part of what was called AHS, provincial government) contracts out ambulance service in certain municipalities.
Many small municipalities do not want to run their own local service, so a company like Medavie will pick up the EHS contract and provide ambulance services for the community.
In Strathcona County, the actual County (big C) has the AHS contract to provide emergency medical services (EMS) services. This is done through Strathcona County Emergency Services (SCES), which also operates our fire department. This is called integrated services. Other larger urban centres in Alberta have a similar model. The benefit is having your first responders cross-trained
In addition to the funding from EHS (the province) the County puts more funding into SCES EMS to increase the level of care we get as citizens. This top-up funding means among other things we have better trained paramedics.
AHS decided to cut the provincial funding significantly. It has given the County the option to continue providing EMS through SCES, but basically pulling their most of the provincial funding.
This means that to keep EMS within SCES and continue providing the high standard of care, the County would have to pay a few million more through of their own money.
If the County does not want to continue providing EMS through SCES, EHS will put out a RFP and companies like Medavie can bid on the contract.
This would mean SCES would be reduced to just fire. Layoffs would be significant. Hopefully those staff could work for Medavie but Medavie is a significantly worse employer than SCES and their requirements are a lot lower, meaning we’ll have worse trained EMS staff in the County.
There is a middle ground options where SCES will retain what are called Community Response Units (CRUs) on their own dime for medical first response while EHS outsources the rest of the EMS to the lowest bidder. IMO this seems unlikely but who knows.
The predicted cost to taxpayers will be small, probably less than $2 per month per household (I could be wrong here), but with the coming increase to property tax, this is could be tough sell.
Council will vote May 12
This is a step by the provincial government to cut spending and pass on costs to the municipal level.
So no, Strathcona County will not be without ambulances, but those ambulances might be outsourced to a private company rather than being operated by our county.