Alberta communities ran out of ambulances 31 times last weekend, union warns

When Maulik Doshi's 18-month-old daughter came down with a fever and chills last month, he was worried but never thought it could turn into one of the longest waits of his life.

Unable to get a doctor's appointment in Calgary, he took young Ira to the hospital.

After a 15-hour wait at the hospital and still no doctor, he decided they could head home and wait things out. But by the wee hours of the morning, Ira's condition had worsened.

"She was shouting, crying, shouting, crying. She was knocked down and shivering. So I thought she had a seizure," Doshi told the Calgary Eyeopener this week.

Doshi called 911 at 5 a.m. and stayed on the phone with the dispatcher for nearly a half-hour but no ambulance came. He then hung up to look after his daughter. 

Forty minutes after his first call for help, the dispatcher called back to say they did not have an estimated arrival time for the ambulance due to larger than expected call volumes.

"Just imagine no ambulance in Canada for an hour and then say, we don't know when the ambulance really comes," Doshi said.

It sounds like a rare and terrifying story everyone would fear — but Doshi is not alone.

Last weekend, there were at least 31 "code reds" or "red alerts" in Alberta — 31 times that no ambulance was available to respond when someone called for help, according to the Health Sciences Association of Alberta (HSAA), the union that represents the province's paramedics.

And there were at least 39 times when 911 callers had to wait anywhere from 30 to 86 minutes — far longer than the target times set out by the province.

Ninety per cent of ambulances should respond within 12 minutes in urban centres and 15 minutes in smaller communities of 3,000 or more people, according to Alberta Health Services (AHS), which is responsible for dispatching ambulances in the province. 

In total, 68 communities had some form of rerouting, red alert, dropped ambulance or long response, stretching from the northwest to the southeast.

CBC News obtained the numbers from the HSAA after the union launched a sustained social media campaign meant to highlight the gaps in the system.

CBC News asked AHS to confirm the union's numbers but AHS has not responded directly to the question, nor has it released its own figures.