The Province is freezing plans to centralize ambulance dispatch services around the province, including in Jasper.

“There are a lot of concerns in rural Alberta,” Alberta Health Minister Gene Zwozdesky said Tuesday, March 16, after making the announcement at the Alberta Association of Municipal Districts and Counties spring conference. “What they’re supposed to have accomplished is greater and faster access for ground ambulance, and better efficiencies in the system.”

The centralization plans will likely still occur, just at a later date, sometime by 2012, said Zwozdesky. The plans are to centralize all 35 of the province’s ambulance dispatching service centres (which are controlled by a variety of different groups) into three, Alberta Health Services controlled locations: Calgary, Edmonton and Peace River.

Until that happens, in Jasper, Parks Canada will continue to provide dispatching services of ambulances from their location in town.

The plans to move the dispatch service from Jasper to Peace River while at the same time continuing to use Parks Canada equipment has raised the hackles of Parks, who have refused to let the province use one of their radio frequencies.

According to Jasper EMS Ambulance Manager Paul Kennedy, the decision to wait to implement the new centralized system is a good one. It will give the province more time to sort out technical issues with setting up the new dispatch network, which is overloaded and requires fine tuning right now, said Kennedy.

“Now they can sort of sit back and go and review what they really have to get done,” said Kennedy.

Kennedy said that he supports the province’s decision to centralize.

For instance, he said that if an ambulance from Jasper today were on its way back from Edmonton, passing near a new emergency just outside of Hinton, there is currently no way to properly get word to the Jasper ambulance. The Jasper ambulance might be closer to the emergency, but the emergency call would still be routed directly through Hinton.

“It’s only a matter of minutes that we’re talking about saving here, but that can really matter sometimes,” said Kennedy.

He said that the new centralized dispatch centre in Peace River would be able to see on a map all of the ambulances in the area through GPS locators in every unit. The central dispatchers will be able to pinpoint an emergency and then send the closest ambulance, instead of just contacting the closest dispatch centre, said Kennedy.

“Overall, it’s a much better use of our resources,” said Kennedy.

Kennedy also rejected the idea dispatchers need to be located in the town they serve because it gives them local knowledge which will help them guide an ambulance around the idiosyncrasies of an area’s geography.

“They’ve got a computerized mapping system. It will work,” said Kennedy.

The province’s delay is being hailed as a satisfactory idea from other parts of Jasper, but for different reason’s than Kennedy’s.

“We feel we’ve had good service from the local dispatch,” said George Krefting, municipal manager for the town of Jasper, who said that he had no problem with the province’s decision to hold back on centralization.

Krefting also said that the Province’s decision will not stop the town from changing its plans to rename streets and renumber buildings in town. Those plans were initiated, in part, to help out of town dispatchers guide ambulances around Jasper.

Still, Krefting said that the renaming plans were sound.

“It just needed to be done. The new names make a lot more sense,” said Krefting.