Some emergency calls in St. Albert are taking well over 20 minutes for an ambulance to arrive on scene, according to data released by the city, prompting an angry response from the mayor.
The response time is 22:05, 90 per cent of the time when an Edmonton-based ambulance is dispatched or 23:44 when the ambulance is coming from one of Spruce Grove, Morinville or Parkland County, shows data compiled by Alberta Health Services and released yesterday by the City of St. Albert.
Mayor Nolan Crouse blames the province's new borderless ambulance system.
"I'm mad and it's unacceptable," he said.
Crouse is demanding the province pay for a third full-time ambulance in St. Albert, where the city provides two ambulances under contract to Alberta Health Services. When these units are unavailable ambulances from outside the city respond to St. Albert calls.
"It's unacceptable to me as mayor of this city and I'm expecting a response from Alberta Health Services what they're going to do about it," Crouse said of the response times.
It would cost the province more than $1 million a year to fund another full-time ambulance, he estimated.
Alberta Health Services knows when St. Albert's two ambulances are busy on calls and often sends an ambulance from Edmonton to be on standby in St. Albert, said Trevor Maslyk, AHS executive director of operations for the north/Edmonton zone.
This coverage happens an average of 3.5 times a day or 109 times a month, he said.
"I'm very comfortable with the level of service that they're getting," he said.
The average number of 911 calls per month in St. Albert is 254, with 85 per cent of these drawing a response from St. Albert Fire Services and 15 per cent from surrounding municipalities.
St. Albert ambulances posted a response time of 10:44, 90 per cent of the time. This includes calls that take them to areas outside the city like Morinville or Sturgeon County, Maslyk said.
The response time for the city's two ambulances is hovering around 10 minutes for calls within St. Albert, said fire Chief Ray Richards.
The longer response time from Edmonton is a combination of driving time and availability of ambulances, he said.
"The system is so stretched there's just no extra capacity to flex vehicles in and out," he said.
With a borderless system, the question isn't whether St. Albert needs another ambulance but whether the overall system would benefit from another ambulance, Maslyk said. He thinks adding a unit during peak times makes the most sense and his department is in discussions with St. Albert on that subject.
Old benchmark
It's a standard convention to rate emergency response times at the 90th percentile, which means 10 per cent of the calls take longer. The city uses nine minutes as its response time benchmark.
However, Maslyk said this internationally recognized figure is based on a 1979 study completed at a time when defibrillators required a paramedic. Now "defibrillators are on every street corner," he said.
"[Nine minutes] is an industry standard that is antiquated and we are trying to find out what the most appropriate level should be now," Maslyk said.
Crouse said he's heard "horror stories" of ambulances taking up to an hour to arrive at a call or ambulances from outside the city getting lost on St. Albert's meandering, non-grid streets. He's dialing up the political pressure after finding no satisfaction from closed-door meetings with AHS and spending months trying to get data from the agency.
"Part of the reason that I believe they have not been publishing the data is because response times have been unacceptable around the province," he said.
Maslyk said centralization of dispatch services required AHS to combine different data gathering systems, which is just now starting to provide reliable information.
St. Albert ran its own integrated ambulance and fire service prior to April 1, 2009, when it began operating its ambulances separately under contract to the province. The city's ambulance contract will elapse this April.
Council decided in a closed door meeting Monday to negotiate a one-year extension, Crouse said.
