Sask. paramedic on psychological injury leave warns of mental health impact of strained system
CBC
When Samuel Colin was a teenager, his father's alcoholism became so serious that Colin wanted to have the proper medical training in case the worst happened.
Colin trained to be a paramedic at 19. Today, at 25, he is an advanced care paramedic based in Regina.
The job has become more difficult than he ever could have imagined back when he was simply a concerned teenaged son.
Saskatchewan is facing a provincewide shortage of ambulances, as well as long wait times for EMS responses, according to the province's largest health-care union.
The Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA) told CBC in an emailed statement in late October that both it and Saskatchewan's Ministry of Health are aware that there are times where call volumes may exceed anticipated and planned-for staffing levels.
Colin paints a more troublesome picture.
"When I first got into EMS, we were maybe doing a couple of calls a day and it would be things like chest pain or shortness of breath or a broken leg or something like that. But as the pandemic kind of started to slide in at first, what I noticed was we were seeing a huge increase in overdoses," said Colin.
Early in the pandemic, Saskatchewan was seeing a lot of people injured by fentanyl and other drugs. As people were forced into isolation, away from family and friends, many with addiction issues struggled.
But the increase in EMS calls went beyond addiction.
Colin says Saskatchewan's doctor and psychiatrist shortage has led people to not bother with long walk-in clinic wait times. Instead, they wait until their illness becomes acute and end up needing an ambulance.
Colin says matters worsened from winter 2021 to summer 2022, as ERs continued to overflow and EMS sometimes fielded more than 100 calls a day.
"For quite a while we were actually using the EMS garages for patients to basically be in there on beds, because there was no room in the waiting room, there's no room in the hallway, there's no beds available," Colin said.
Admission to ERs is based on acuity, so Colin spent many hours in EMS garages, topping off patients' medications and just simply waiting while ambulances stayed motionless and calls racked up.
"For myself and for a lot of other paramedics, we kind of felt like our abilities and our skills and the things that we went to school to train for ... we're not necessarily getting to do all the time because we're sitting in offload," said Colin.
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