The opioid crisis makes all of us less safe by straining first responders

This column is an opinion from Dan Scheuerman, a retired Calgary firefighter. For more information about CBC's Opinion section, please see the FAQ.

An opioid overdose 911 response begins when someone is found unconscious and barely breathing. If you've regularly taken public transit or walked around downtown, no doubt you've already witnessed a few.

As a Calgary firefighter, I went to more of these than I could count. Usually multiple times a shift. This is what happens.

Fully-staffed ambulances are often delayed, so single emergency medical services units with a single medic are sent just to have some technical medical care on scene. 

At the same time, dispatchers send a full fire truck with four firefighters. Calgary firefighters are basically there to provide non-technical medical care. A police unit also heads over.

A non-stop barrage of overdose calls saturates our first responders' time and hampers our medical systems' capacity.

The suffering is sustained at all levels: those fighting their addictions and their demons, their loved ones, the under-resourced front line mental health professionals who consistently lose their patients to the drugs, Calgarians who don't feel safe on transit or downtown, already strained emergency rooms with our highest-functioning nurses being pushed to their limits, and the first responders who witness these slow-motion suicides in real time.

No one wants to tackle this problem head-on because it isn't politically expedient. As political institutions point fingers, costly first responder and emergency room resources are struggling to maintain coverage.

If Calgarians knew the true cost of the crisis, and the critical gaps that are growing in our emergency service coverage, the situation would be treated as the catastrophic social crisis it is.

This article is my way of showing taxpayers what a typical overdose response looks like, what it costs, and the risk to your personal safety. This is my way, after being on the front lines, to communicate the extreme cost and hidden ways it affects the emergency services you take for granted.

911: There's been an overdose at...

Since our EMS system is stretched to the point where ambulances are commonly unavailable, ambulances are often last to arrive to an overdose call. By the time they do, there are typically two or three medics, four firefighters, and two police officers present at a single person's overdose.

When a fire truck is dispatched it has three firefighters with salaries above $100,000 each and a captain earning $129,000, not to mention the costs of the truck itself.

Add in the paramedics and police, and it's common to have over $800,000 salary's worth of first responders on scene, when this problem could be tackled earlier in the addiction pathway with more effect and less cost.  

And when an ambulance isn't immediately available, protocols dictate the fire truck has to sit on scene to monitor the patient until paramedics arrive, even after responders administer naloxone and the patient "comes back."

Fire crews must do this for other minor medical calls, too. I've waited more than one hour on such calls, and since retiring, I've heard colleagues say it's only getting worse. 

This opens gaps in fire coverage across the city. When multiple overdose calls come at once, or trucks are sitting on minor medicals due to dispatch protocols, it can lead to longer response times and less effective fire protection. 

The Calgary Fire Department is covering gaps in Alberta Health Services' failure to operate an effective ambulance service in the Calgary area, which has been massively exacerbated by the opioid crisis.

Several hundred times a month, Calgary goes into Red Alert, which means no ambulances are available for a 911 call. If you or your loved one have a catastrophic medical event, advanced medical care isn't available for you.

AHS should make Red Alerts public, to hold the agency accountable to taxpayers.

Fixing this

We need to end the empty political talk and shifting blame. The crisis can only be addressed through a concerted effort across all government levels and by involving everyone — from mental health workers, first responders and emergency room staff to those who no longer use drugs — in creative, progressive policy change.

Intervene before someone becomes a street user caught in the cycle, treat at-risk people earlier and improve awareness. By investing in mental health professionals on the front end, we'll reduce the number of people who progress through the system.

Pushing this problem to first responders and emergency rooms is quite literally the most expensive way to deal with this crisis, and is only a Band-Aid solution.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And in this case, it can be measured in millions of dollars and reduced capacity in our already weakened health-care system.

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