This is the weekly column by editor/owner of the Border Pulse – Dan Gray
Lloydminster’s ambulance problem has stopped being a whisper.
For years, paramedics raised concerns quietly, worried about staffing, exhaustion and patient safety behind closed doors. Now the warning signs are public, and they are impossible to ignore.
Sources with direct knowledge of local EMS operations recently described a stabbing victim who could not wait for a Lloydminster ambulance because none was available. The nearest crew was coming from Vermilion. The wait was forty five minutes.
Read that number again.
When Lloydminster shifted ambulance service to one provider on both sides, the change was meant to fix chronic understaffing. Three weeks ago, the city was down to one ambulance crew. That crew was asked to respond to an emergency north of Bonnyville and refused, because leaving would have left Lloydminster with zero ambulance coverage.
Zero. In a city this size.
Part of the strain comes from inter-facility transfers. These are trips where a patient needs a higher level of care or testing than Lloydminster can provide, but does not qualify for air ambulance. A ground crew takes them instead, sometimes to Edmonton.
Sometimes that crew waits and drives straight back. Other times, they drop the patient and return empty. But according to multiple sources familiar with EMS logistics, an ambulance dispatched to Edmonton can occasionally get pulled into the provincial system there, working calls in the capital while Lloydminster sits short a unit. Nobody can say for certain how often this happens, or for how long. That uncertainty is part of the problem.
This is not unique to Lloydminster. Ontario has already found one partial answer.
Private patient transfer companies operate across that province, handling non-urgent, non-emergency moves. Discharges home. Transfers between nursing homes. Bed-to-bed hospital transfers that do not require paramedic-level care, just a stretcher, a trained attendant and a safe ride.
These companies are licensed, but they are not paramedic services. They carry oxygen, basic first aid training and CPR certification. If something goes seriously wrong mid-transport, they call 911 and reroute to the nearest emergency room. What they do not do is tie up a fully staffed, publicly funded ambulance for a trip that never needed lights and sirens in the first place.
The idea is simple. Keep real ambulances free for real emergencies.
Lloydminster does not have that option right now. Every inter-facility transfer, urgent or routine, comes out of the same small pool of ambulances this community depends on for everything else.
I do not have all the answers on how a private transfer model would work across a border city split between two provinces, two health authorities and two sets of regulations. That is a harder conversation than most people realize.
But the current system is failing people in the moments that matter most. A stabbing victim waiting forty five minutes for help is not a staffing inconvenience. It is a warning.
BorderPulse will keep asking Medavie and SHA how they plan to fix this, and we will keep publishing what we learn, whether they answer or not.
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We need a national medical system not provincial medical systems that treat blood tests and clinical test results as state secrets. I have personally been a victim of this whe I had my heart procedure done. The hospital in Saskatoon could not access any tests done on the Alberta system in Lloyminster. All the tests had to be done over in the RUH in Saskatoon. A friend of mine was in BC and it was determined that he needed Coronary Artery Bypass Surgery in Penticton he was held there for a week until they stabilized him so he could travel back to Alberta for the surgery. Not acceptable. There should not be territorial ambulance services just ambulance services.