FORT FRANCES — Following news of the planned restructuring of ambulance services in the Rainy River District, the president of the local union representing area paramedics said it’s the latest result of a long-running, complex issue that has no easy answer in sight.
Malcolm Daley is a professional paramedic and the president of CUPE Local 4807, the union representing paramedics in the Rainy River District.
The Fort Frances Times reached out to him for comment following last week’s news that the District of Rainy River Services Board (DRRSB, formerly RRDSSAB) was planning to temporarily relocate ambulance services in the area, removing emergency paramedic services from Emo to Rainy River and Fort Frances, and bringing the Community Paramedicine program to the station in its stead.
The statement from the DRRSB noted the decision was made due to “ongoing and significant staffing shortages” and that it is planned to happen at some point in the future, though no specific date was given.
Daley said what’s happening in the district isn’t new, and isn’t unique to our area.
“It’s a long story,” he said.
“We’ve been in a situation, not just locally, but across the province for a couple of years now where staff replacement hasn’t been taking place due to various factors, like expansion within the career. If you create more jobs that you don’t have bodies for, now you’re short.
"Retirements, the traditional exit areas for this career like injury, workplace stress [which is] unfortunately being overrepresented in our profession. When people are leaving the career for whatever reason, we’re just not replacing them at the rate that we used to in order to keep up the demand, which is ever-increasing.”
Daley pointed out that this loss of manpower in the field hasn’t been happening all at once, rather with numbers of local paramedics dropping over an extended period of time. Where once a shortage of jobs meant people had to move far afield to get their career, now those same individuals who might once have moved here can stay closer to home and still get a job.
Likewise, those who had moved away for their job as a paramedic can now likely get the same job closer to home. Both these points mean attracting new paramedics to the region, and keeping them here, has become even more difficult.
“If you were to compare our numbers to 2019... even up until 2020, late 2021, we still had full staffing,” Daley said.
“We’re almost down 40 percent from that number. We just feel it a little bit more in the north, as we do with everything. We are isolated here. We are our own animal. We suffer from access to services at seemingly a higher rate, or it seems more magnified to us. And paramedics are no exception, we’re in the same exact boat.”
The decision to move emergency services out of Emo means that communities that are served by those ambulances will soon be in a position where the ambulance will be coming from farther away in response to an emergency, something Daley said should be getting the attention of everyone in the district.
“That results in Emo being 30-plus minutes from an ambulance,” he said.
“It results in Northwest Bay being even further from an ambulance, New Gold mine being even further from an ambulance, Barwick, Chapple, Rainy River First Nations. These are all the communities that are serviced by Emo where they don’t even have an emergency department.
"Our members are citizens of these communities, as much as everyone else. We should all be outraged that we’re in this situation where, based on geography and lack of forethought and incentive, we’re suffering a serious loss of service.”
The staffing shortage has an even wider knock-on effect than just the reshuffling of services, however.
Daley noted that the paramedics employed in the district are going above and beyond to ensure services remain as consistent as they can be, sometimes working twice their required hours or more to keep areas from experiencing downstaffing when a base doesn’t have enough paramedics on the job to run the ambulance.
“We are working as many overtime hours, sometimes in a month, as we have, you know, year to date in the past,” Daley said.
“We have paramedics that are burning the candle at both ends, working tirelessly, going into work just to make sure there’s an ambulance on the road. We have a lot of members that when they hear there’s not going to be an ambulance in a certain community, they’ll go into work, whether they want to work that day or not, just to make sure someone’s there.”
The problem with this, Daley said, is that it just isn’t sustainable, as it can lead to even more paramedics experiencing significant stress or injury. The official position from the union is that service should be maintained at the Emo station as well as it can be, but there’s no denying something has to be done to address the shortage of paramedics in the district, lest more disruptions occur in the future.
“We have to do something to attract more people here,” Daley said.
“We have to get more paramedics here, or else this is just the first step. I would hate to imply that there’s a simple solution, because it’s a complex issue. We need to capture every possible person that we can, we need to bring more people in. Those are avenues that need to be wholly investigated. Why are we a not attracting people the way we used to. And B, why are we losing people that we have?”
The most realistic option available, Daley said, is to attract more people who are already in the district into the paramedic profession. With programs like the provincially funded Stay and Learn grants available through organizations like Seven Generations Education Institute, efforts are underway to incentivize locals to become paramedics, but it’s still a relatively lengthy process that won’t fix the problem overnight.
Daley said more needs to be done on all levels to incentivize more people from other parts of Ontario to choose the Rainy River District to work over others.
“At one point, the province over-produced medics comparatively to the amount of available positions,” he said.
“And now we significantly under-produce medics, and that’s just based on more or less a standard labour model that is occurring in lots of industry right now. We’re not alone in the paramedic shortage, and we’re not alone in the labour shortage. Everybody’s short. It’s just trying to draw attention to our specific section here.
"If we want people to leave an area where they have a life and a family, where they were educated or maybe worked, to come up to northwestern Ontario, they do need an incentive, because the only incentive they used to need was ‘there’s work available,’ and that’s just not enough anymore.”
There are efforts underway within CUPE and paramedic locals in the province to lobby the government for new and different incentives to bring more people into healthcare in the north of the province, Daley said, as well as pressure on ambulance service operators to promote their areas with further incentives to recruit and retain paramedics in the north.
Conversations need to happen at all levels to address the issue, and all levels need to contribute to the solution, whatever shape it may take.
“What we are trying to do as CUPE 4807, as a local, we’re trying to draw attention to the issue, because that’s how grassroots change takes place, conversation in the public sphere, drawing attention to that issue, bringing it forward to stakeholders, elected representatives at all levels,” he said.
“Whether it be a provincial representative, federal, municipal, the DRRSB itself. The goal here isn’t to lay blame with anybody, because how can we blame one person, one organization? There’s certain details that occur that are questionable, and we would like to see more attention to northwestern Ontario and it comes to healthcare in general, we would all agree to that, but what we need to keep the focus on is that, if we continue on this trajectory, we’re talking about long-term life-altering losses to what we have in place.”
“We as paramedics, as constituents of these areas, of these communities, and taxpayers within them, as citizens in this area, we also have family members here, and we want to make sure ambulances are available,” Daley continued.
“We want to make sure that ambulance takes them to an ER that’s fully staffed, and that they have access to a family doctor, and it’s the whole system in general. The initiative of discussing paramedic shortage in particular is hearing how this specific section is hurting right now, let’s take a closer look at it.
"We need to start paying some serious attention and coming up with some active solutions on how we’re going to maintain this service for future generations, as well as how we’re going to support and more or less reward the people who are tirelessly performing this task currently.”
Fort Frances Times / Local Journalism Initiative
