Cochrane considers buying its own ambulances while MD of Willow Creek prepares to put three vehicles on the road
Rural municipalities have been given the green light by the Alberta government to deploy their own ambulances in an effort to improve response times.
Cochrane, located just west of Calgary, has struggled with an ambulance shortage for years with town council now pursuing the option to buy its own response vehicles.
The Municipal District of Willow Creek, located southwest of Calgary, isn’t waiting to launch its service, announcing earlier this month the municipality is ready to roll out three ambulances that were purchased as part of a 2014 pilot project that was cancelled.
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Reeve Maryanne Sandberg said there has been a lack of ambulances in her municipality, which also serves Nanton, Claresholm and Fort Macleod along the province’s busy Highway 2.
“Like many jurisdictions in rural Alberta, our ambulances were dispatched or left in cities and we didn’t have them available for our rural residents,” said Sandberg. “And we have been after Alberta Health and Alberta Health Services (AHS) and different ministers over the years.”
Despite the 2014 pilot project being successful, it was cancelled because health officials deemed the numbers didn’t justify continuation, said Sandberg.
“To us, it didn’t matter about numbers. It mattered about lives and the care our residents got within our MD,” she said.
Sandberg is welcoming the changes.
“Our policy has been, it doesn’t matter if it’s just one life or 10 lives, it’s still a life and to us, that’s very important, especially when our MD was willing to absorb the costs,” she said.
While Willow Creek’s three vehicles provide the services and have the capabilities of ambulances, technically, they are patient transport vehicles, explained director of emergency services and fire chief Kelly Starling.
If AHS ambulances are delayed, “we can call an online medical control doctor who will give us direction based on patient presentation and give us the option to transport the patient to the closest hospital or to a responding ambulance that is on its way,” said Starling.
Starling added that most volunteers with the MD’s fire service already have advanced training to deal with medical emergencies.
“All of our staff are trained to a medical first responder level, which is two steps higher than what a general first aider would have — all the advanced health-care provider skills that would be needed for patient care,” said Starling. “Then we have our advanced care paramedics and our primary care paramedics that assist with that.”
Willow Creek’s chief administrative officer, Derrick Krizsan, said it’s too early to say what the frequency of deployment for the municipality’s ambulances will be, but financing for the vehicles will come from funding already provided by the province for emergency services.
According to the Alberta NDP and its access to information request, rural ambulance diversions to Calgary from neighbouring communities of Strathmore, Chestermere, Airdrie and Cochrane occurred more than 30,000 times between 2019 and July 2022.
