Imagine you're in one of Alberta's many towns in the South Zone—Oyen, Cardston, Fort Macleod, or Brooks. There’s an emergency, and you breathe a sigh of relief when you realize your town has an ambulance. That is, until you find out that the only one available has been sent off to another community. Welcome to AHS EMS South Zone’s version of “coverage.” In reality, this zone has been so poorly managed that many towns are left with nothing but skeleton crews when it matters most.
For these communities, ambulances aren’t just a convenience—they’re a lifeline. With few or no nearby hospitals, EMS is often the only safety net during an emergency. But AHS’s so-called “centralized” approach means ambulances are frequently relocated or sent on non-essential transfers—many of which could be handled by telehealth. This is AHS’s vision of “consolidation.” At www.wheresmyambulance.com, we see it differently: small towns, much like those in Calgary Zone, are the biggest losers in AHS’s so-called “borderless system.”
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Brooks, home to nearly 15,000 people, has a unique claim to fame: the ultimate game of ambulance musical chairs. Here’s how it works—one ambulance gets sent off for a transfer to Medicine Hat, often for cases telehealth could handle. The other ambulance? Off to Duchess for a call. And voilà—Brooks is left with exactly zero ambulances when a real emergency strikes. AHS might as well sell tickets to this game because rural towns never win.
AHS calls this “equitable healthcare,” but in the South Zone, equity is as real as a mirage in the desert. By the time ambulances finally return, crews are either too exhausted to function or legally required to rest. And let’s not forget the cherry on top: thousands of ambulances across the zone have sat idle, unstaffed, over the past four years. Bravo, AHS, truly a masterclass in logistics.
The harsh truth? AHS has elevated the system above the people it’s meant to serve, leaving rural Albertans to suffer the consequences. Ambulance roulette isn’t just reckless—it’s dangerous. It’s time to end this high-stakes gamble before lives are lost.
In our blog post Dude, Where’s My Staff?, we pulled back the curtain on Calgary Zone’s EMS staffing crisis. The South Zone’s situation isn’t much brighter. Since 2019, there have been 123 Advanced Care Paramedic vacancies and 149 Primary Care Paramedic vacancies. Translation? A vacancy rate of 18.51% last year.
But don’t worry, folks—AHS has heroically slashed that rate to a whopping 14.15%. Progress? Sure, if you count rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic after its hit the ice berg as progress. Keep it up, AHS EMS; you’re doing amazing work!
Let’s break this down, shall we? AHS EMS South Zone’s hiring strategy looks like trying to fill a leaky bucket—with a teaspoon. They needed 272 full-time paramedics. What did they manage? Just 68 full-timers and five part-timers. To plug the massive shortfall, they tossed in 300 casual staff. Problem solved, right? Sure, and next we’ll sell you the Calgary Tower for a loonie.
Casual staff are like Band-Aids on a sieve. They help in a pinch but don’t address the relentless bleed of vacancies and burnout. Worse, they can’t even reliably cover the roster when emergencies spike—as AHS has painfully discovered time and time again. Every resignation or burnout siphons off critical experience and continuity.
If AHS thinks a patchwork of casuals can fix this mess, they might as well replace the Calgary Tower’s foundation with popsicle sticks.
Let’s dive into the South Zone’s version of the paramedic exodus: seasoned staff flipping the “nope” switch and dropping to casual. Just like Calgary Zone, this trend screams one thing—leadership failure. It’s the corporate equivalent of setting off every alarm in the building while management strolls around with noise-canceling headphones. In most industries, losing your most experienced workers to lower engagement levels is like waving a neon sign that says, “We have no idea what we’re doing” (Harvard Business Review, 2022; Kotter, 1996). But AHS EMS? Their response is more like, “Problem? What problem?”
Here’s the kicker: since 2019, paramedics stepping back to casual roles has skyrocketed. In 2019, it was six. By 2023, a staggering 31 paramedics decided, “I’m out.” For perspective, those losses translate into ambulance coverage that’s disappeared faster than management accountability:
2019: Equivalent to 3 ambulances gone.
2020: 1.5 ambulances.
2021: 2 ambulances.
2022: 10.5 ambulances.
2023: 15.5 ambulances.
2024 (so far): 14 ambulances—and counting.
If AHS EMS were a case study, it’d headline an MBA course titled, “Burnout: The Art of Losing Your Workforce.”
Oh, let’s put on our rose-colored glasses for a moment! Maybe AHS EMS leadership sees the workforce walking away from full-time chaos as a brilliant new strategy. Perhaps they’re rebranding mass resignations and attrition as “streamlining” or “innovative workforce reshaping.” Because really, what else explains waving off experienced staff like it’s a farewell parade—other than being entirely out of touch?
Here’s the translation into cold, hard reality: since 2019, ambulance shutdowns have skyrocketed, yet AHS EMS leadership keeps reshuffling the same deck of excuses. Instead of addressing burnout, low morale, and vacancy crises, they’re leaving small towns even more vulnerable. If this is their “strategic plan,” it’s less “equitable healthcare for all” and more “good luck surviving without us.”
And now, let’s get to the grand finale: ambulance timeouts. These aren’t the relaxing “let’s take five” breaks. No, these are the moments when paramedics, after enduring 12 to 14 grueling hours, have no choice but to tap out—not because they want to, but because they have to. Fatigue doesn’t just pose a health risk—it’s a liability. But here we are, with 2,822 paramedics clocking out due to sheer exhaustion after pushing themselves to the brink.
Why does this matter? Because it exposes the absurdity of AHS’s core flex model. These are your acute care ambulances, and they’re routinely worked to the point of fatigue—or “timing out.” This doesn’t mean the paramedics vanish; they’re still in town, and their ambulance is still parked, but they cannot respond to emergencies. They’ve been legally overworked. So, if there’s an emergency and they’ve hit their limit, your local ambulance can’t answer the call—because they’ve been stretched thin handling non-urgent transfers.
This isn’t exactly breaking news—it’s more like a tired, well-worn chapter from the AHS EMS playbook. Step one: overwork your staff until they’re ready to collapse. Step two: offer them a barely-legal eight-hour break (just enough time to eat, sleep, and reconsider their life choices). Step three: throw them back into the grinder. Or, more accurately, come up with even more creative ways to optimize your crews and do less with more. It’s almost as if leadership either doesn’t understand the problem—or worse, doesn’t care. Either way, it’s clear: the human cost of this "strategy" is astronomical, and no surprise that vacancy-related shutdowns are spiraling out of control. We’re talking 5,084 shutdowns in the past four years alone in just South Zone!
The math here is pretty straightforward: burned-out Paramedics + chronic understaffing = communities left high and dry in critical moments. Yet instead of tackling this snowballing crisis, AHS EMS leadership continues to recycle their tired mantra: “More hires coming soon!” Sure, more bodies might help, but only if they last longer than it takes to realize they’ve made a colossal mistake.
This pace isn’t just unsustainable; it’s downright reckless. Sure, you can call it “doing more with less,” but it sure seems like they are testing how far they can stretch people before they snap.
Now, let’s talk about relocation requests. This gem is AHS EMS’s way of turning an already bad situation into a full-blown circus. Picture this: your town’s ambulance doesn’t just disappear for an hour or two—it gets sent to another community for half a shift, often after driving hundreds of kilometers. It’s like a twisted version of Uber: “Instead of your driver being five minutes away, your ambulance is 100 kilometers out, and good luck with that.”
Why does this happen? Well, when you’re clocking up 5,084 ambulance shutdowns and 2,822 paramedic timeouts in just four years, options become... limited. So, AHS EMS falls back on their go-to coping mechanism: robbing Peter to pay Paul. Forget the ideal number of ambulances each community is supposed to have—that’s just a suggestion now. AHS calls it their "efficient, borderless system," but to anyone paying attention, it looks more like a frantic shuffle that drains paramedics dry while leaving communities wondering, “Where did all the ambulances go?”
What’s truly absurd here is that when you dive into the statistics, it’s glaringly obvious that certain towns are hit much harder than others. Take a look at Bassano, Brooks, Drumheller, Hanna, and Taber, and compare them to the rest of the stations—there’s a pattern.
Ambulances from these communities are constantly being shuffled out of their areas and sent elsewhere. Heck, we’d even bet money that the same thing is happening on the South West side of the zone, though we don’t have that data to confirm it (yet).
Now, let’s talk transfers and their impact on the system. According to South Zone staff, transfers have always been a point of frustration. Sure, we get it—there are times when a transfer is absolutely necessary, a matter of life or death. But it’s the routine, mundane transfers—like those for follow-up appointments, which last a whole five minutes—that really grind the gears. These may seem insignificant in the grand scheme, but they wreak havoc on the paramedics, forcing them to vacate their communities and leaving those areas without crucial acute care EMS support.
In a sample of these South Zone communities, which have a combined total of 14 ambulances, there were 2,493 transfers. And guess which communities took the brunt of it? You guessed it—those few key areas we just mentioned. When you contrast this with the ambulance shutdowns and the overwhelming number of paramedic fatigues, it starts to paint a clear picture. The load on these rural paramedics is not just heavy; it’s absurd. So, it should come as no surprise that people aren’t quietly quitting, but rather the staffing shortages are escalating into a full-blown stampede.
Some of these rural communities don’t even have healthcare facilities big enough to justify the huge volume of transfers. We're talking about clinics with a handful of beds and staff just doing their best. So when you look at the number of transfers compared to the actual foot traffic, something doesn’t quite add up—it’s like sending 10 trucks to pick up a couple of lattes.
Let’s be clear: this isn’t about blaming the facilities or patients. They’re doing what they can. The real issue is the system AHS has created, overloading these small communities limited EMS resources with transfers that don’t match their capacity. It’s the equivalent of treating the symptoms without addressing the root cause: a broken system. You can’t blame Rural towns Ambulances for being overwhelmed when the entire system is stacked against them.
It’s not all doom and gloom, though. Unlike the Calgary Zone, some facilities in the South Zone have actually taken steps to observe the policy regarding EMS transport. In these areas, patients are assessed using a flowchart to determine if their situation truly requires an ambulance or if non-emergency options like alternate transport arrangements could suffice. It’s far from perfect—some medics in the zone have voiced frustration that certain hospitals still largely ignore the policy—but there have been efforts. In one instance, a South Zone manager even took the initiative to visit a hospital and demand they follow the policy. Imagine if Calgary Zone management showed that kind of backbone! But no, while South Zone hospitals at least have a reporting mechanism for non-compliance, Calgary Zone seems to operate on a different set of rules. There, rural hospitals continue to abuse EMS resources with little to no accountability. Perhaps the disastrous staffing shortages in the South Zone play a role, but Calgary Zone medics need to remember that there is a policy in place—one that rural hospitals blatantly disregard without consequence, even in this so-called "borderless system."
Thats right Calgary Zone, many of those rural transfers you do? The Hospital was supposed to find alternative transport for them as a policy and they did NOTHING of the sort!
Unfortunately, the gaps left by these abuses and shortages often fall on the shoulders of fire departments in rural areas—departments largely staffed by volunteers. While these volunteers are undeniably heroic, they’re not equipped to replace EMS. Their training and resources are meant to supplement paramedics, not act as a stand-in because the local ambulance is tied up at the cast clinic. Worse still, when both ambulances and volunteers are unavailable, patients are left to languish for hours, waiting for a response that should’ve arrived in 15 minutes. It’s a grim picture: a ticking time bomb that endangers rural Albertans, leaving them at the mercy of a system that is, at best, inefficient—and, at worst, incompetent and negligent.
If you want to support these efforts to hold AHS accountable, please consider visiting GiveSendGo.com/GC4M8 and donating. It’s time for all of us to demand real change.
Irrefutable truth! The result of no leadership (in spite of their Royal Rhodes EMS Management degrees. 🤣) for 15 YEARS!!