What A Planet Rebooted - Stories from the World of EMS

[BCExpat]

My oldest son is a paramedic. He worked for years for a first nations EMS service as well as for AHS in Calgary. He has seen a lot of shit in his career, including some very funny stuff, but also some of the grossest stuff you can imagine. He has since moved onto an air ambulance service which he really likes. It's a tough job and I don't envy anyone who is a paramedic.

Not sure where your son worked, but my friends in Alberta and Saskatchewan who have worked in EMS on the northern reserves have the the most horrifying stories I have ever heard.

When he was down south here in Alberta, he worked on a reserve east of Calgary. Now, he is based out of Grande Prairie and they serve all of northern Alberta, especially remote communities and first nations reserves. Still lots of bad calls, but he likes it better than working out of an EMS station on a reserve.

[Cornuck]

Reading this thread, I'm just hoping the pay is excellent for these people.

[JelloPuddingPop]

Reading this thread, I'm just hoping the pay is excellent for these people.

I'm guessing no amount would be "enough," but they certainly aren't paid fairly. Though the same can be said about Teachers, Nurses etc.

My friend who is a doctor up here, have mentioned the Paramedics typically only make around $50.00/hour, plus On-Call. Is that enough to arrive to some of the scenes they have to deal with?

First responders need to be making Petey money in my book.

[BCExpat]

It definitely takes a certain type of person to do the job. As bad as some of the things that my son saw and had to respond to, it really didn't seem to bother him. On some calls, he was offered counselling afterwards, but he has never accepted it. He seems to be able to cope with the worst things. I definitely wouldn't be able to handle it.

[2Fingers]

Just saw on the news that BC is advertising in western USA for doctors and nurses to come to BC. Doctors can be re-certified in 6 weeks and nurses even sooner.

What do you think Mëds?

[Meds]

Just saw on the news that BC is advertising in western USA for doctors and nurses to come to BC. Doctors can be re-certified in 6 weeks and nurses even sooner.

What do you think Mëds?

Crossing between the US and Canada is very easy for doctors and nurses.

To license as a registered nurse with a bachelor's of science requires writing the NCLEX in bother countries, so a very seamless process. Canadian RN's have been flying south for years for better contracts and signing bonuses. We need the staff, so go for it.

Not totally sure the process for physicians, but in general the degrees and licenses are recognized as equal, and again, the brain drain into the US has been happening among physicians for decades. Time to attract them back if we can.

Our healthcare system won't easily create new positions though, so instead they spend billions on agency nurses in temp spots rather than solve the real problem by creating permanent positions. Nurses are disgruntled because their employers are giving new grads huge signing bonuses for relatively short service agreements, but not rewarding long-term commitment or offering the same bonuses to existing staff in exchange for a similar term of service agreement/extension.

They also are being displaced by temp agency staff. For example, my wife is a RN who had a full-time position in ICU.....she comes in for work and is told that she is being redeployed to emerg for the night because the agency nurse that is being paid $35/hour more than her refuses to work emergency and will only work in ICU. This happens routinely here to the ICU staff.....to the point that we don't have many regular ICU staff left because they either retired, quit, or took positions in departments like OR or hemodialysis. The end result is that ICU is understaffed and emerg is also shorted.

A new hospital just opened here in Terrace last November. The ER went from having 5 + 5 beds with 3 nurses to having 14 + 4. Did they increase the number of nurses or doctors? Yes, they added 1 nurse. When you consider the triage position, the 4 nurses was already too few for the 5 + 5. The ICU went from having 3 + 1 beds to having 12. Did they increase the nursing staff? No. They opened with a plan to only operate 6 ICU beds, but have already run over that at times due to need.

The common solution in our healthcare system is for the bureaucrats to create an admin position to deal with a given problem. What this looks like is rather than actually address problems with practical solutions our politically appointed managers show up to meetings and announce that they are aware and the problem is being addressed by "committee X" who have recommended creating a procedural step to properly allocate resources and direct the flow of patient care to the appropriate departments and specialists. This admin will then have no resources to actually combat the problem and becomes just another stepping stone in delaying the chain of actual patient care delivery.

I read a comparison of our public health system to Germany's. It pointed out that in Germany you have 1 administrative position in their healthcare system for every 15000 citizens, while in Canada you have 1 administrative position for every 1500. That number may be slightly off as I can't find the document, but it's close. The availability of specialists in Germany versus Canada is much higher.....staggeringly so. They put their money into educating and training people to actually provide what is required in timely fashion, while we put the money into paying people to come up with reasons to explain why wait times are months and years long.

[2Fingers]

Why doesn’t the media bring this up to the government? This drives me nuts seeing so much money spent on administrative and management vs delivering a service.

I work for a government agency and waste I see is ridiculous. The higher the level of government the more administrative it becomes. I remember negotiating with the BC government at 1 job and we had 2 ministries to deal with. Every round took months because both sides had to have their say.

Thanks Mëds, always learn a lot from your posts. A lot is frustrating to read.

[Topper]

During COVID we saw how many Canadian nurses living in Windsor work at Detroit hospitals.