City to hire 15 paramedics with ‘game-changer’ funding

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This article was published 20/10/2023 (887 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The City of Brandon will soon be able to put a third ambulance into service and reassign police officers minding the holding cells at Brandon Police Service after receiving new ongoing funding from Shared Health.

The $2.2 million in funding will allow for 15 new paramedics to be hired, Brandon Fire and Emergency Services Chief Terry Parlow told staff assembled at Fire Hall No. 1 on Thursday.

Of those, 10 will be assigned to make it possible for three ambulances to be operating within the city at one time. For the last several decades, only two ambulances have been active at one time in Brandon.

With Shared Health providing another ambulance to the city, Brandon’s fleet will now consist of six vehicles.

“This funding will ensure that rural ambulances won’t need to respond to Brandon to assist with calls, thereby leaving those rural ambulances in their communities where they are needed most,” Parlow said.

“I would be remiss if I did not take a moment to thank the rural ambulances and those paramedics in the rural areas around Brandon that have responded daily to our needs as a city.”

Beyond the improved service, Parlow said the extra staff would help fight against staff burnout.

The other five paramedics will be assigned to watching detainees at Brandon Police Services headquarters throughout the entire year.

While the new BPS paramedics will mean officers assigned to watch those cells can be reassigned to their regular duties, acting chief Randy Lewis said they’ll be able to assess the health of incoming detainees instead of having them automatically taken to the hospital.

Lewis recalled how during the COVID-19 pandemic, the province ended the police services’ remand agreements with provincial correctional centres, making those services responsible for housing prisoners.

As part of that, the previous provincial government committed million of funds towards building new permanent detention facilities at BPS headquarters, which are still under construction.

“Since that time, our members have literally spent thousands of hours in the Brandon Regional Health Centre emergency department with intoxicated prisoners waiting to be cleared medically so they could be lodged in our detention unit,” Lewis said. “Having paramedics working in our detention unit going forward, we’ll put officers back on the street where they belong.”

On top of hiring new staff, the chiefs said the funding will also cover the costs of training them and purchasing new equipment.

So far, four of the new paramedics have been hired. The chiefs said they hoped all the staff and the third ambulance would be up and running by early January 2024.

Lewis added that construction on the new holding cells is supposed to be completed by the end of November.

Mayor Jeff Fawcett called the funding a “game changer” for local emergency services.

In the last couple of years, Brandon City Council has added funding for more paramedics positions during budget deliberations to help improve service levels. The mayor said the city was making an argument that by doing so, they were essentially offsetting regional health care.

“What’s happened here should be a financial benefit to the city,” Fawcett said. “For one thing, overtime costs will drop. There is more ability to get our ambulances on the road, which is a revenue driver. There are times when we can’t get [ambulances] to Winnipeg because we don’t have them. Now we can.”

Fawcett praised Parlow and Shared Health for their work on arranging the funding and said that in his discussion with Manitoba’s new NDP government, support has been expressed for this kind of initiative.

He added that the announcement likely would have come under the previous Progressive Conservative government’s tenure, but it couldn’t be finalized before the pre-election blackout period.

In a statement to the Sun late Thursday, Shared Health said it was pleased to work with Brandon Fire and Emergency Services to respond to the growing needs of the community and is looking forward to working out the details of a new service purchasing agreement in the near future.

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