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A quiet winter afternoon with his grandmother turned traumatizing for Dallas Kalaman.
On Jan. 5, the Regina man was helping prepare supper for his 81-year-old grandmother when she began having stroke-like symptoms, forcing him to call 911 for help.
“The operator at the end of the line said, ‘Listen, we don’t have any ambulances in service right now. We will try to get one as quickly as possible when they become available. Call back if her symptoms worsen,’ ” Kalaman recalled, noting the operator didn’t give him a timeline.
Twenty-seven minutes later, in another room — careful not to make the elderly woman feel as though she was sitting in limbo — he redialed the operator to escalate the emergency call.
After another 20 minutes and a third phone call by Kalaman, paramedics rushed to the door and transported the grandmother to hospital.
“It was the longest 45 minutes of my life — just not knowing what to do and just begging for emergency services to get there as soon as they could,” Kalaman said. “It’s a very traumatizing event. You don’t really know what to do, but try to be strong to give strength to her.”
The Saskatchewan Health Authority couldn’t speak to this specific incident, but explained to 980 CJME that there was a surge of seven calls within an hour on the afternoon of Jan. 5.
“That particular day, we were fully staffed; we had seven staffed ambulances on — plus a supervisor, who also responds to calls,” said Ken Luciak, the director of EMS for southern Saskatchewan.
He noted the rush of calls that afternoon were triaged to determine who needed the most urgent assistance.
“When a surge occurs, sometimes you can’t maintain that median or average response time,” Luciak said.”You could have a very quiet Sunday morning or Saturday afternoon, where you have people in their stations waiting for a call, and then next thing you know all the ambulances are engaged. It happens very, very quickly.”
Throughout the full 24 hours of Jan. 5, Luciak said the average emergency response time was 7.82 minutes and non-emergency calls clocked in at 9.2 minutes.
While he noted that a 45-minute wait is “not very common at all” in Regina, Luciak admitted emergency services do field occasional complaints about wait times.
“It wasn’t a one-off; we’re definitely studying this closely and trying to find solutions for this,” he said.
Luciak listed the community paramedic program at Saskatchewan Polytechnic, new clinical response plans and making better use of the health authority’s partner agencies as some of the options to improve ambulance wait times.
However, he added that finding a solution can be challenging.
“The surges are hard to predict. I know that the paramedics are working very, very hard, and we are looking at means to be able to add additional resources but it’s still too early to say when that might occur,” he said. “It’s going to happen, I’m just not sure when.”
Without giving an exact number, Luciak said the health authority hopes to hire more paramedics in the spring to add to the 101 full- and part-time workers in Regina.
“Sometimes, adding resources is one solution, but another solution is making more effective use of the resources that we have. We are looking at all sorts of options at this time,” he said.
In Kalaman’s eyes, additional resources could have prevented a stressful situation for his family.
“(Paramedics) need help in order to help us — and they’re not getting that,” he said. “At the very basic, fundamental level make sure that there are enough ambulances, enough personnel (and) enough resources available to take care of the plethora of emergency calls that come in.
“This isn’t something that’s rocket science … everybody deserves a fundamental right to emergency care in a time of need — and that’s not being met and that needs to change.”
