Anyone who gets sick or injured on the Coast on the Aug. 28 to 30 weekend, take heed: there may not be an ambulance for you.
Staggering holes in staff schedules at the Gibsons and Sechelt ambulance units indicate that, unless paramedics can be rustled up from amongst burnt-out local staff or brought in from off-Coast, the Coast's fleet of ambulances will drop from its usual six to a total of two for that weekend.
"It's very critical that we have all those [six] ambulances all the time," said Gibsons paramedic and shop steward for the Ambulance Paramedics of B.C. (APBC), Charlie Greenaway. "There are lots of times when every ambulance is out. There's lots of times where you go to the hospital and you want to clear as quickly as possible because there are no ambulances on the Coast, and you want to drop your patient and get out."
Paramedics at the Gibsons and Sechelt stations attribute the scheduling holes to a range of interplaying factors: injured colleagues, exhausted staff who've been putting in extreme hours since the paramedics' strike started Apr. 1, and the lack of financial incentive for paramedics to give up one of the last sunny, summer weekends for a $10 per hour stand-by wage.
The scheduling holes and the underlying causes, said B. J. Chute, director of public education for APBC, relate directly to the issues paramedics are striking about.
"There are not enough ambulances and paramedics on any given day in the province," he said. "And when you rely on a workforce, like for example on the Sunshine Coast, that's largely a volunteer workforce -or at least treated as one by the employer - then we oftentimes see gaps in the scheduling just because paramedics have other commitments."
Paramedics on the Coast, he said, may be making as little as $2 per hour for on-call shifts - which include all shifts out of Madeira Park, and a number of shifts out of Sechelt and Gibsons units. On-call paramedics have to be within five minutes of their station at all times. The rest of the Coast's 57 paramedics, he said, with the exception of five full-timers, are paid $10 per hour to work stand-by shifts where they wait in the station and only switch to their regular paramedic wage if a call comes in.
This pay scale, Greenaway said, makes it nearly impossible to recruit and retain paramedics on the Coast.
"You can't attract bodies into the program," he said. "There are people who want to be in the emergency services, so they get into the ambulance [service] and they realize, 'Hey, this is brutal. I can't live on this.' So we've lost people to dispatch, so they go to the dispatch centre in Vancouver. We've lost people to fire; we've lost people to police."
The Coast will only see full ambulance service on the Aug. 28 weekend if one of two things occurs: local paramedics free their schedules, or the B.C. Ambulance Service (BCAS), the paramedics' employer, dispatches duty ambulances from elsewhere in the Lower Mainland to supplement local staffing.
"We could redeploy resources from other areas and most probably the Lower Mainland," said Richard Chick, superintendant of BCAS for the Sunshine Coast, Sea to Sky and Howe Sound.
But Chick said there was no specific threshold which would necessarily trigger this response, and stressed that BCAS would far prefer to see local staff organize themselves to fill the staffing gaps. He added that having three days of no availability at two stations "raises red flags" and "looks like a co-ordinated type of event."
But Greenaway says this isn't the case. "There is no collusion," he said.
Chute said he expects no reinforcements from BCAS.
"Generally what they do is roll the dice and hope that nothing bad happens and leave these communities uncovered," he said.
And already, Greenaway said, Coast paramedics are assuming that it'll fall to them to keep the Coast safe on a weekend that will likely see a surge of possible patients, ranging from the elderly to guys on motorcycles.
"I myself am gone that weekend into the city. It's probably going to piss my wife off because I'm probably going to end up back here at some point in time to work those shifts to fill the ambulances," Greenaway said. "We don't want to see those ambulances go down."
