Northern BC one of hardest-hit areas as ambulance union deals with paramedic shortage
Northern BC is one of the regions hardest hit by a province-wide shortage of paramedics that has reached critical levels.
Shifts are going unstaffed in Prince George and wait times are increasing, especially for non-life-threatening situations, due to chronic shortages of personnel and a change in the how overtime shifts for paramedics are scheduled, according to the ambulance union.
“Northern BC and the Interior, unfortunately, are the worst for staff, percentage-wise, and rural and remote communities are obviously the worst,” said Ian Tait, a spokesperson for the Ambulance Paramedics of BC CUPE Local 873.
“Prince George does suffer from staffing. It’s not as bad as rural and remote northern BC but I’d be lying if I said they were perfectly staffed at all times. The low-acuity calls are where you see wait times go way up and it’s happening everywhere.”
Tait said some jurisdictions have only 50 per cent coverage of paramedic shifts and most never achieve 100 per cent coverage.
“We do have problems staffing the planes and all that type of stuff on a regular basis but it’s really a lot more the rural and remote areas that are suffering in the north,” said Tait, an advanced care paramedic in Chilliwack who also supervises crews in Vancouver.
“Fort St. John, Mackenzie, Fort St. James, it’s a constant struggle to get permanent staffing to a lot of these areas and especially when you add on these small hospital closures.”
The BC Ambulance’s Service has a travelling paramedic program that brings temporary locum paramedics by plane, bus and helicopter to get to smaller communities, especially when there is a hospital emergency room closure, but there’s no permanent fix in sight.
The province is still willing to pay the overtime but no longer allows paramedics to pre-schedule overtime coverage weeks or months in advance to fill in for co-workers who are sick or go on holidays. Tait says not allowing any lead time in scheduling is an unnecessary disruption for paramedics already dealing with high call volumes and the burnout that comes with their job as front-line first responders.
“If you look at the 2025 schedule, January to December, there are hundreds of predictable open holes in the schedule in any community – holidays, sick time, someone got injured – and usually they’re scheduled months in advance,” said Tait.
“We would normally plunk in pre-existing employees that want to work on their days off into these holes. Well they decided to stop pre-scheduling them and they’re now calling on a daily basis. They call you at 6:01 when they realize the shift we never filled last month is still empty. That’s one of the least successful ways of getting people to work.”
The province has about 6,000 paramedics and about 1,000 of them work only part-time. Since 2021 the province added 750 full- and part time positions in rural and remote areas but Tait says only about 350 of those have been filled, leaving close to 400 vacancies.
Prince George has two ambulance stations, one at UHNBC and one at the airport. Three ground ambulances are staffed by a pool of 35 primary care paramedics. There are nine advanced care paramedics in the city and 12 critical care paramedics who staff two ground units and the air ambulance fixed wing and helicopter service.
The stress that comes with the job of a paramedic can be debilitating. Post-traumatic stress from seeing horrific accidents and people dying before they get to the hospital is an issue that affects paramedic recruiting.
“A lot of it is because of the volume,” said Tait. “When you work as a station that has four ambulances and two of them are sitting empty, that means the remaining two are doing the work of four, and that volume gets to you as well.
“Fixing staffing fixes a lot of those things because a lot of the burnout comes from overwork and not having breaks and not having down time. When you’re short-staffed you can’t ever get those breaks.”
The idea of interprofessional teams involved in pre-hospital care and municipal fire departments hiring their own paramedics to fill in the gaps in paramedic coverage is commonplace in Europe, South Africa, Australia and Alberta, where ambulances are based at fire halls.
There are doctors who work as on-scene volunteers on calls attended by North Shore Search and Rescue and in Nelson, where two emergency physicians with the Kootenay Emergency Response Physicians Association voluntarily attend to accident scenes to provide care for the sickest, most critically injured patients in areas not served by advanced paramedic care.
Tait says the ambulance union would rather see doctors and nurses working in hospitals than have them provide paramedic services.
“We believe that first responders need to stay in their lane,” said Tait. “We have a couple of projects and trials in the province where doctors on their days off are getting in an SUV and showing up to ambulance calls and we are not in support of that.
“The amount of calls where a physician can actually make a difference on a patient is such a small percentage that it in no way justifies the cost or the staffing. To put it bluntly, if that doctor wants to make a real difference, they should stay in the hospital and see 20 or 30 that are sitting in the waiting room per day, instead of playing paramedic on their days off to see one patient.”
BCEHS is also utilizing nurses in the Northern Health region to attend to patients on interfacility transfers from smaller hospitals to larger centres. Tait says that work should be performed by paramedics.
“We have critical-care paramedics that are probably higher-trained than a critical-care nurse that do that work, but again, there is a staffing shortage,” said Tait. “If you take a critical-care nurse and put her in an ambulance on an eight-hour transfer or that nurse could be looking after two or three patients in ICU.”
Prince George Fire Rescue firefighters are trained to emergency medical responder standards, the highest level of medical training the firefighting force is allowed under the BC Emergency Health Services Act. Because firefighters are tasked so as first responders to medical calls due to paramedic shortages, Tait says municipalities and health authorities are forced to eat costs the province’s health ministry should be covering.
“The fire budget for municipalities is increasing because they do first responder and medical work,” he said. “I’m not saying that’s wrong (but) we pay taxes for there to be a provincial ambulance service that’s supposed to be staffed and funded properly and since that hasn’t occurred we are now running into the fire departments offsetting the ambulance service at the cost of the municipal taxpayer.
“You will see them come to all these calls as first responders because for every ambulance station there’s 10 fire halls, so statistically they’re always closer. But the only reason they’re really going is there hasn’t been enough paramedics for 40 years.”