Luebke pitches continuation of EMS funding

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This article was published 10/09/2022 (1259 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

During the City of Brandon’s last set of budget deliberations, $300,000 was allocated to the operating budget for Brandon Fire and Emergency Services to hire four temporary positions to help it deal with paramedic staffing shortages.

Coun. Bruce Luebke (South Centre) wants that funding to continue until a new permanent plan is in place from Shared Health.

On Thursday, Luebke tweeted his intent to bring forward a motion to keep those positions funded on an annual basis if he’s re-elected to Brandon City Council in next month’s municipal election.

The city’s most recent list of council candidates shows Luebke is currently unopposed in his district, which is being renamed Ward 6.

“Shared Health was undertaking a review of ambulance service in the province,” Luebke said.

“It was hoped that this was going to be completed sometime in 2022, but it doesn’t appear like it’s going to be the case, which means from our standpoint in the City of Brandon … these four positions were funded in our budget for 2022 basically for the last three-quarters of the year.”

That means, he said, if they are to continue into next year, the city will have to account for them in the 2023 budget.

Though Luebke said Shared Health should absorb the cost of those four positions moving forward, he’s open to working out a cost-sharing agreement as well.

Amid an ongoing paramedic shortage, Brandon Firefighters Paramedic Union president Terry Browatt posted on the organization’s Facebook page that there were several times a day when Brandon was without any paramedic coverage.

Since then, Shared Health has expanded air ambulance service for transfers and created a transfer service for low-acuity patients to help address the situation.

Luebke acknowledged that those efforts have likely reduced the strain on the system, but said they’ve been incremental improvements. He said the extra positions have likely made a positive impact on Brandon, but won’t be a cure-all.

“I feel like we need to have that conversation with the province and say, ‘We feel it’s important to keep these into 2023 until you decide what our provincial ambulance services is going to look like moving forward,” he said.

By phone on Friday, BFES Chief Scott McDonald said the extra positions, expanded air ambulance and the new transfer service have had a positive effect on his department.

Call volumes for emergency medical service are still high and BFES is still working on tackling that issue with Shared Health, he said.

BFES and Shared Health are discussing a new service agreement, he added, but deferred comment on those discussions to Shared Health. A Shared Health spokesperson said the organization was unable to provide a comment on negotations Friday afternoon.

The president of International Association of Fire Fighters Local 803, which represents firefighters and paramedics with BFES, applauded Luebke’s idea and said he has been engaged on BFES’s needs during his term.

“I’m glad to see he’s supporting the added funding for those four positions,” Terry Browatt said.

“I would say that [they] have helped reduce overtime, but when it comes to staffing within the City of Brandon to help the people of Brandon, we don’t see it as much.”

While it has helped with transferring patients to Winnipeg, and the low-acuity transfer service has helped with transferring patients to and from personal care homes, Browatt said permanent funding for these four positions and four more would allow for a third staffed ambulance to be active within Brandon.

Browatt added that BFES is dealing with 15 per cent more calls right now than the same time last year.

Brandon’s only current mayoral candidate, Coun. Jeff Fawcett (Assiniboine), agrees with continuing the funding.

“A major platform piece for me are these ongoing and consistent discussions with the province, in particular, but sometimes it will also have to be with the federal government … on exactly these sorts of issues,” Fawcett said.

Like Luebke, Fawcett said he believes the financial onus should ultimately be on Shared Health, since health care is a provincial obligation. He said he hopes that the city won’t need to put up the money but believes funding should be maintained in the meantime.

Another idea Luebke said he wants to bring forward, if he’s re-elected, is to examine the possibility of installing a rapid transit system in the wake of the city cancelling its on-demand transit pilot project last week.

“The way our transit system is set up … it’s providing a service to those who don’t have alternatives,” he said. “They don’t have the ability to have a vehicle or whatever the reason might be they use our transit system.”

He said he wants to know if there’s a way to make Brandon Transit a viable alternative to people using their vehicles or other modes of transportation.

If Luebke were to travel to work on transit every day, he said, it would likely take him 40 to 60 minutes to get from pickup to drop-off — longer than driving. Making it a viable alternative would mean making people’s commutes equal or slightly longer than driving.

He said a transit route driving back and forth on Victoria Avenue, from 34th Street on one end to 17th Street East on the other, is an example that could work.

Again, Fawcett agreed with Luebke on the transit idea, saying the idea of rapid transit is something that Coun. Kris Desjarlais (Rosser) has championed for a long time and is worth looking into.

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