Alberta Health details how it will put more ambulances on the road

Alberta Health has released new details on how it plans to improve ambulance and paramedic performance in the province.

This comes after a 30 per cent increase in 911 calls in the past year and numerous reports of ambulances taking much longer to respond to calls or even not coming at all.

Alberta Health says in a release that nearly half of the additional $64 million to be spent in the next fiscal year will go toward adding new ambulance crews and funding air ambulances.

That includes five new 24/7 ambulances to Edmonton and Calgaryand additional 12-hour crews to Lethbridge and Red Deer.

"This additional funding will allow us to add more ground ambulances and crews, which will help us better serve Alberta patients," Alberta's chief paramedicDarren Sandbecksays in the release.

"This investment will also allow us to move forward immediately with some of the key initiatives of our 10-point plan, including the Calgary integrated operations centre and a pilot project related to inter-facility transfers."

But Mike Parker, president of the union representing paramedics,says the new hires won't keep up with the number of paramedics leaving the profession due to burnout.

"They are hiring anybody that they can to get them on the trucks," he said at a press conference Thursday. "And we don't even have anyone applying. We don't have any professionals left in this province to even fill these trucks."

Parker says that with Alberta competing for highly trained medical professionals on a global scale, the province needs to create additional health-care spending places in post-secondary institutions.

"Ambulances don't take people to the hospital. It's paramedics and it's communications officers who respond to those calls for 911," Parker said.

The budget money comes after two years of dwindling emergency medical servicesperformance and response times.

CBC News has reported extensively on the issues with red alerts when no ambulance was available to respond to an emergency calls taking more than 30 minutes for an ambulance to arrive, dropped 911 calls and diversions of crews well outside of their service area.

Alberta Health says it has nearly completed its plan to hire 66 additional staff while recruitment continues, according to the release.

About $22 million will be used forground ambulance contracts and to support integrated operations centres and inter-facility transports projects.

The inter-facility pilot project frees up ambulances to handle emergency calls by creating a team to handle non-emergency hospital transfers. It will start as a pilot project in Red Deer and expand on trials in Edmonton and Calgary.

The integrated operations centre will put EMS and health-care leadership in a single facility to co-ordinate transfers from EMS to hospitals.

Fourteen rural communities will benefit from $14 million directed at the "hours of work initiative." Paramedics will shift their hours of work in order to reduce fatigue from working long shifts.

The communities are Fort Macleod, Lamont, Slave Lake, Wainwright, Castor, Canmore, Boyle, Vermilion, Drayton Valley, Valleyview, Drumheller, Bassano, Two Hills and St. Paul.