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Town will walk away from ambulance service

The Town of Westlock will no longer run the ambulance service in town, and will hand off control to Alberta Health Services effective April 1, 2012. During an in-camera session at the Jan.

The Town of Westlock will no longer run the ambulance service in town, and will hand off control to Alberta Health Services effective April 1, 2012.

During an in-camera session at the Jan. 10 town council meeting, councillors debated divesting the service after hearing from staff, and moved to notify AHS of the desire to turn control over to them.

“After doing analysis, we think that the service is not going to change from when we were contracting with Alberta Health,” said mayor Bruce Lennon. “Nothing much should change.”

The decision came after discussion with AHS over how the ambulance service would be run in the future.

“What the province wanted was a five-year commitment by us, being the Town of Westlock, to enter into a five-year contract with them to provide ambulance services,” Lennon said. “After analysis by our administration as well as by council, we feel it was a lot of red tape and administrative work.”

As such, he said the town gave the required one-year notice to AHS that the town would not continue on in its role as the service provider because “it’s too big a commitment for us.”

The town is obligated to provide the service until April 1, 2012, but after that date AHS will take over all aspects of the operation.

Lennon said the decision was not without some concern for how the quality of service would be affected. With the change to AHS control, it’s possible a Westlock-based ambulance may have to make a trip to Jasper.

However, since AHS would be monitoring the locations of all its ambulances, the town would not be shorthanded. If Westlock needed an ambulance, one would be brought in from another centre, he said.

AHS has committed to providing the same level of service, Lennon said, including vehicle availability and adequate training of personnel. In addition, the move is in part to make the service more efficient by centralizing control.

“I guess we can see where they’re coming from,” he said. “They think by having this bigger overall dispatch service they can, through economies of scale, save some money and do it more efficiently.”

The changeover will not have any financial impact on the town, Lennon said. The town will no longer be responsible for the ambulance building, the ambulances and the staff. Instead, AHS will assume all the costs and responsibilities of operating the service.

Moving forward, Lennon stressed council does not see how Westlock residents will see any change in the service provided.

“Overall, our feeling is the service will not be any different whether we’re contracted running it or someone else is,” he said.

For many years, the town was part of a regional ambulance service, alongside Westlock County, the Village of Clyde and the M.D. of Lesser Slave River. This changed to the current arrangement in 2009, which sees the town provide ambulance service under contract to AHS.

The change in 2009 was part of a province-wide move that saw AHS take over ambulance services across Alberta. Municipalities were given the option to let AHS take over completely, or continue to provide service as a contractor.

“We’re one of the few ones that actually continued with the contract with Alberta Health,” he said. “Most municipalities got out of it at the first go round, but we felt, at least in transition, we wanted to keep it in this area.”

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