APH is in a period of modernization, one that will reshape how we deliver care, use our resources, and meet the needs of patients across Alberta. This work focuses on improving resource allocation, supporting practitioner wellness, and ensuring our resources are deployed where and when they make the greatest difference for patients and communities.
Key areas of focus include:
Emergency Communications Officers (ECO) removed the pre-alert response and instead assess the level of care required prior to allocating resources. At any point during a call, if it is identified that there is a critical situation, an ambulance will be dispatched immediately. For all other calls, an ambulance or care recommendations will be assigned once the clinical need is understood. This change aims to reduce response times for the most urgent, life-threatening calls.
Advanced Care Paramedic Clinicians in Dispatch brings deeper clinical expertise into call assessments to ensure we dispatch the right level of care and resource. CiDs will conduct additional clinical evaluations over the phone to triage the clinical needs of patients. By implementing CiD's, patients will receive the right level of care, advice or be able to inform the right level of resource to respond to the patient for low acuity. This initiative will help deploy resources more effectively by collecting more information about the event before dispatch, reduce unnecessary ambulance responses, support patient-centred decision-making, and preserve emergency ambulance capacity for patients with time-critical needs.
In addition to CiDs being integrated into dispatch, CiDs will play an integral role in Inter-facility Transport (IFT), ensuring a patient's condition is accurately reflected and support alignment between patient need and the planned paramedic resource. This will reduce non-clinical transfers and ensure we preserve capacity for emergency events and clinically necessary interfacility transports.
This initiative aligns the utilization of lights and sirens responses to the clinical needs of the patient. Lights and Sirens responses will still be used for all life-threatening events, but for urgent, not immediately life-threatening events, paramedics will have the ability to determine if a lights and sirens response is clinically required. Low acuity events will continue to be responded to without lights and sirens. This change increases safety for paramedics and Albertans on our roadways, while ensuring patients that will clinically benefit from a lights and sirens response continue to do so.
The HELP-U pilot adds six new non-transport vehicles into the EHS fleet. Three non-patient transport vehicles in Calgary and three in Edmonton are staffed by single paramedics who will respond to low-priority, low-acuity calls where patients are not expected to require urgent or emergent transport to hospital. Paramedics provide on-scene assessment and treatment, which will help preserve ambulance availability for patients experiencing emergent or life-threatening events.
ALTA Paramedic Health (APH)/811 Shared Response continues to evolve to reduce unnecessary ambulance responses. This collaboration between APH and Health Link 811 allows for the transfer of APH callers who APH assesses as low-acuity - or not experiencing a medical emergency that requires an ambulance - to Health Link 811 registered nurses for assessment and care options. This collaboration provides better support for patients while allowing ambulances to remain in the community to respond to life-threatening emergencies, meaning faster emergency response times and better flow through the health system.
Building on the APH/Health Link 811 Shared Response program launched in 2023 which transferred non-life-threatening 911 calls to Health Link nurses, the response program has expanded in Edmonton and Calgary to include alternative transportation for patients who need in-person medical assessment but do not require an ambulance. Eligible low-acuity callers in Calgary and Edmonton who are advised by a registered nurse at Health Link 811 to see a doctor within 24 hours may be offered a taxi service to the nearest hospital emergency department (ED) or urgent care centre (UCC), if they do not have another way to get there, at no cost to the patient.
