No Resource Available
What happens when someone calls 911 but there is no ambulance available to respond?
This has been an ongoing problem since 2021 that continues to negatively impact our community. When there is no ambulance available to respond to a 911 call it will be put into "pending status", which means it sits in limbo until an ambulance is available to be assigned to the call. Calls can stay in pending status for minutes to hours. Our dispatchers are given the unfair task of identifying calls that are low priority and can hopefully wait for an ambulance. This task is difficult and susceptible to errors, which can result in true emergencies being put into pending status if the 911 caller provides inaccurate information. Sometimes, when the city is really busy, high priority emergency calls are even put into pending status deliberately. Eventually paramedics will start responding to the backlog of calls to provide assistance to those who have been waiting. This is not how a properly funded EMS system functions.
Unfortunately, every paramedic has several stories of arriving at a call that has been pending for hours only to find a patient who is very sick and needs to be rushed to the hospital. Another heartbreaking occurrence that is all too common involves our elderly patients falling to the ground and being unable to get up without assistance so they call 911. When their call for assistance is put into pending status, they often have to wait several hours on the ground for an ambulance because their call is deemed low priority. By the time paramedics finally respond, we often find them with pressure sores and laying in their own feces and urine because they could not make it to the washroom. It's not uncommon for some of our elderly patients to lay on the floor for over 5 hours waiting for an ambulance when we are busy.
This graph uses data from several of our FOIP requests. It displays the cumulative hours that 911 calls have spent in pending status in Edmonton. As a reminder, pending status is the period of time when an ambulance has not been assigned to the 911 call. This graph is not showing response times, it's showing the cumulative amount of time waiting for an ambulance to be assigned to a 911 call. Our data only goes to April 2025 but check out these stats from 2025 so far:
January 2025 - 12,739 total 911 events and 623 hours spent in pending status
February 2025 - 12,052 total 911 events and 1,312 hours spent in pending status
March 2025 - 13,101 total 911 events and 949 hours spent in pending status
April 2025 - 12,525 total 911 events and 644 hours spent in pending status
Let's be clear, the number of hours 911 events spend in pending status should be 0. An EMS system needs to be robust enough to handle unpredictable and dynamic 911 call volume. This includes having proper funding for an appropriate number of ambulances and a work environment that attracts and retains paramedics. We currently have neither. The most recent provincial budget provided no new funding for additional ambulances and we continue to struggle to find and keep paramedics who want to work in Alberta to staff the ambulances that we do have.
The government will tell you that this is simply a problem caused by paramedics being stuck waiting in hallways. This is not true. This is a problem of not having enough resources to meet increasing 911 call demand. Our previous posts have shown the dramatic increase in 911 call volume while our resources remain stagnant. We need real investment in our EMS system to expand capacity. Edmonton paramedics have no faith that the current healthcare restructuring will help with anything because the amount of resources are staying the same. All the money being spent on restructuring should be getting spent on adding ambulances to the road and recruiting and retaining paramedics.
When you call 911, how long are you willing to wait for an ambulance to be assigned to your event?
