Southwestern Manitoba's biggest city adds 3rd ambulance to its fleet

Joseph Nault's tumble outside a local grocery store left him with a broken hip and injuries from the cold after he waited more than 40 minutes for an ambulance in southwestern Manitoba's biggest city.

The temperatures that evening in January 2022 hovered around –35 C in Brandon, he said. The cold seeped into him as he lay on the ground, leaving him with water blisters, a step below frostbite.

"I ended up with minor frostbite on my bum and my back.… The water blisters were breaking and they were very uncomfortable and scary," Nault told CBC. "You worry about infection."

There were no ambulances available in Brandon, provincial health-care agency Shared Health told the Brandon Sun at the time.

Nault ended up being taken to the Brandon Regional Health Centre by an ambulance from Rivers, 40 kilometres north of Brandon.

Brandon's city council has designated new funding for a third ambulance in the 2023 budget in the hopes no one else has a similar experience. The budget adds $300,000 per year starting in March for four new staff to operate a spare ambulance owned by Shared Health. The total cost for new staff will be about $400,000 a year.

"It's just a good use of the equipment that we already have in place. We're just staffing it better," Brandon city manager Ron Bowles said.

It's the second substantial increase in two years, after four staff were added in 2022.

First responders' emergency callouts have gone up from 3,500 responses in 2017 to 5,000 in 2022, Bowles said.

"These four new staff will be a huge help to take off the burden on a lot of employees that are having to come in on overtime."

The City of Brandon provides ambulance services for much of the region under contract with Shared Health.

Brandon is currently negotiating with the province about ambulance services. Bowles said city council is acting in good faith with the new funding, knowing negotiations with the province are ongoing.

"It's flat-out very busy and we do not want our service impacted," he said. "The four staff last year and then the four additional staff this year is to keep our standard quality of service at a high level."

Building capacity

The addition of a third ambulance in the city is a "huge step forward," said Terry Browett, president of Local 803 Brandon Firefighter Paramedics E911 Dispatchers, because it will help prevent staff burnout. 

"It's a huge call volume and … we're starting to feel it," he said. "When you don't have any units that can respond to emergency calls … it creates a lot of unnecessary stress."

The third ambulance will help spread out that workload, he said, while reducing wait times when emergencies happen.

Over the next year, he hopes the system will be evaluated to see where else added resources are needed.

Over the last 10 years, the call volume in the city has dramatically increased, Browett said. Calls have also become more complicated due to their complex nature and ambulances travelling further outside of the Brandon area due to ambulance station closures in nearby towns like Wawanesa.

"Our ambulances are being stretched further and further, so that means there's less service for the citizens of Brandon," he said.

The association saw a 79 per cent increase in emergency calls between 2011 and 2022, and a 69 per cent increase in all types of emergency calls, a recent social media post by the union said.

In March, Brandon's fire chief will present a plan on staffing that Browett hopes will show there are some added resources and boots on the ground to help when an emergency happens.

In Nault's case, Paramedic and Fire Rescue crews responded to the scene in about 10 or 15 minutes, he said, but they did not have the proper equipment to transport him to the nearby health centre because there was no ambulance.

"If I could have … I probably could have crawled there in less than 40 minutes," Nault said.

Nault says he's sure he's not the only one who's had a problem getting an ambulance.

"I'm sure there's other people that have maybe been in more life-at-risk situations that have had to wait."