It is a catch-22.
Having a fire department is an incredible life-saving benefit to the community and having volunteers qualified to act as medical first responders is equally important.
While we all want the Barrhead Fire Department to respond to medical calls, as ratepayers we don’t want to have to pay for frivolous calls.
The problem is that if you respond to one medical call, you can’t not attend others.
How many of us have been involved in motor-vehicle collisions or had our homes or outbuildings burn? How many of us can say it is thanks to the men and women of the Barrhead Fire Department that our loved ones are still around?
That being said, when the ambulance service is taken out of service due to a provincial mandate that requires them to taxi residents from their homes to eye appointments, et cetera, it puts a strain on the entire system.
Unfortunately, according to County of Barrhead coun. Darrell Troock, a member of the fire committee himself, Alberta Health Minister Sarah Hoffman has said the practice is allowable under Alberta Health Services [AHS] regulations.
Nor is this issue specific to Alberta.
One of our editorial staff, most recently from Newfoundland, recounted the story of the Clarenville-area (Newfoundland) Fewer’s Ambulance Service, a privately owned and operated medical service, which routinely picks up residents from their homes and takes them on all sorts of errands, many of which are not even medically-related.
This, in fact, comes from a former paramedic within the service.
Not everyone is physically able to get themselves where they need to be.
However, an ambulatory service, by its very nature, is for medical emergencies.
That is why, when deputy fire chief Gary Hove made his quarterly report to county council May 16, it came as no surprise that council would vote to have administration look into active resolutions affecting local fire departments and AHS.
Between routine transfers from one medical facility to the next, random non-life-threatening dispatched calls and provincially-mandated taxi-like operations, it is a sad reality that the fire department is called upon more and more.
We are not saying the department should not be involved in medical-assists, but, like county councillors, we believe the whole process should be reviewed.
We live in Barrhead.
Unless you’re on an acreage, the eye doctor is only five to 10 minutes away in either direction.
And we have a couple of local taxi services.
We agree with councillors that it is a difficult path to tread, saying the number of medical-assist calls the fire department is called to needs to go down because if something potentially life-threatening does happen, response times are dramatically increased and the likelihood of survival decreases proportionally.
