Vancouver – Ambulance Paramedics of BC (APBC) – The Ambulance Paramedics of BC (APBC) are calling on BC Emergency Health Services to stop dismantling Community Paramedicine and explain why a program it once called a “success story” has been allowed to lose more than three-quarters of its positions.
Of 101 Community Paramedic positions established across BC, 76 are currently unfilled, with many vacant for more than two years. Rather than restoring those positions, BCEHS is proposing to shift remaining Community Paramedics away from scheduled, in-home care and toward increased 911 response.
“Community Paramedicine is supposed to prevent the 911 call, not simply provide another person to respond to it,” APBC President Jason Jackson said. “These paramedics go into people’s homes, monitor chronic conditions, prevent falls, support medication management and palliative care, and identify problems before they become emergencies. Using them to plug holes in an overwhelmed 911 system is incredibly short-sighted.”
Community Paramedicine was launched in B.C. in 2015, in part to address gaps in health care in rural and remote communities. By January 2019, Community Paramedics had cared for nearly 1,600 patients and completed more than 19,600 home visits. They also responded to 346 acute 911 calls during their shifts,demonstrating that preventative care and emergency response can work together. BCEHS’s own evaluation called the program a “success story” and recommended it be sustained and further developed.
Instead, APBC says the program has been allowed to erode and funding has been diverted elsewhere.
“You cannot starve a successful healthcare program of staff and then point to its reduced activity as justification for turning it into something else,” Jackson said. “These positions had funding. Communities deserve to know what happened to it.”
The impact is particularly concerning in rural, remote and Indigenous communities, where patients may already face primary-care shortages, long travel distances, temporary emergency department closures and fewer local health-care resources.
APBC says Community Paramedics have always assisted with serious emergency calls when needed. The concern is making 911 response their primary function at the expense of scheduled home visits,preventative care and relationships with patients and local health-care providers.
The union is also calling for meaningful consultation before fundamental changes are made.
“Rural and Indigenous communities, local governments, Community Paramedics and patients deserve a voice in what happens to a health-care service built for them,” Jackson said. “This should not be decided without talking to the people who provide and rely on that care.”
APBC is asking BCEHS and PHSA to pause the proposed changes, restore vacant positions and work with the Ministry of Health, communities, health authorities, frontline paramedics and the union to modernize and expand Community Paramedicine. That should include expanding the clinical scope of Community Paramedics and finding new ways to deliver care closer to home.
“We are not asking Community Paramedicine to remain frozen in 2015,” Jackson said. “The program can evolve and we can find efficiencies. But turning preventative healthcare providers into another patch for an overwhelmed 911 system is not modernization. It is a cut to community health care.”
For more information, contact us at media@apbc.ca
