EDMONTON- Alberta's health minister will be releasing a Health Quality Council report on ambulance services in our province, Monday afternoon.
It was one year ago that a group of paramedics shared their stories with Global News, of what they called a crisis in the ambulance system.
The front line workers said many ambulances were tied up at hospital emergency rooms, while paramedics waited with their patients. The paramedics said wait times suffered as a result, and some callers were waiting anywhere from 25 minutes to two hours for an ambulance.
Not long after, Health Minister Fred Horne ordered a review of the province's entire ambulance system.
"As far as we're concerned, EMS is health care. For many Albertans it's their first point of contact with the system," Horne said last February when the review was ordered.
Since then, resources have been added; 17 paramedics were hired, and two new ambulances were added to the fleet.
Paramedics say the changes helped, initially.
"With the influx of money a lot of overtime came out and we started increasing our resource base purely on overtime," said one paramedic who spoke to Global News.
However, staff members say it didn't last long, and the overtime hours were scaled back over the summer.
"They just opened up the bank and said 'here's a bunch of money for overtime, hopefully it goes away.' It hasn't. We're right back where we were," said another paramedic.
Alberta Health Services (AHS) says there have been improvements, though. As of December 2012, nine out of every 10 calls were responded to within 13 minutes, and the time paramedics spend waiting in hospitals has decreased, according to AHS.
Despite those numbers, paramedics say they're right back where they started.
"We're back to the same cycle of dropping units and not having a full complement of cars. We've seen more reds again, we're seeing extremely long response times," explained another paramedic.
The group of paramedics say patient care and experience needs to improve, as well.
"They also have to learn to put the human element back into this," said another paramedic who came forward.
Horne will be making the Health Quality Council report public Monday afternoon.
Paramedics say they're waiting in anticipation to see what the outcome of the review will be.
With files from Vassy Kapelos.
© Global News. A division of Shaw Media Inc., 2013.