Paramedic staffing levels across the Bulkley Valley and Lakes District have seen significant improvement over the past couple of years.
That’s according to the B.C. Emergency Health Services (BCEHS) as recruitment efforts continue in the region.
“We have done a lot of proactive community initiatives such as job fairs, BBQs, and coffee with paramedic events, along with school presentations and training courses in most of our communities,” said Catherine Scott, Nechako District clinical operations manager.
She added recruitment in rural and remote communities has unique challenges with a specialized team working provincewide focusing on bringing on new staff.
Another event ambulance stations have hosted is open houses so community members can talk to paramedics to learn from them about the job.
Stations that have hosted open houses this spring in Burns Lake, Houston, Smithers, Hazelton and other communities.
“It takes time to improve the staffing but through all the various efforts, we’ve made a lot of gains,” Scott said.
One of the main advantages to having a properly staffed station is minimized response time, which means paramedics can properly rest between shifts according to her.
Scott said BCEHS being a provincial service is a benefit, especially for stations that haven’t been as well staffed.
“We continuously monitor the area and are able to move some resources around as needed so we’re a little bit more flexible than some other services who just operate within the community.”
Currently, Smithers has 20 of its 25 full-time positions filled with an additional 10 on-call paramedics.
Houston has filled eight of its 10 full-time positions and has 6 on-call paramedics which Scott called, “great staffing.”
Eight of the 15 full-time positions in Burns Lake have been filled with three on-call paramedics, and the station recently hired four new staff.
Hazelton has recently hired four new on-call staff to increase its count to nine, with 10 of its 18 full-time positions filled.
Granisle has a full-time community paramedic, three of its eight part-time positions filled, three on-call staff, and is seeing support from the traveling paramedic program.
Scott said the Southside station has recently seen success with recruitment efforts, leading to it not utilizing the traveling paramedic program.
It has six of the eight part-time positions filled with three on-call paramedics.
Scott added while staff numbers have improved, recruitment is an ongoing initiative with the service always hiring for new paramedics.
More information about recruitment can be found on the BCEHS website.
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