Coast paramedics and union leadership are predicting that a Ministry of Labour decision to integrate paramedics into the health sector, splitting them into up to five bargaining units, will worsen an already serious recruitment and retention problem.
The Ministry of Health Services announced last week that the BC Ambulance Service will be integrated more closely with the health care system. Labour Minister Murray Coell said no stand-alone bargaining unit will be created for paramedics. Instead they will be integrated into existing health-sector bargaining units.
"I think this will change dramatically how potential paramedics will view whether or not they want to come into the service," said Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) 873 president John Strohmaier. He added that moving paramedics into the health sector will prevent them from achieving any standing with other emergency service workers. "If paramedics wanted to be janitors in a healthcare facility, that's the job they would have applied for. They wouldn't have applied for a paramedic's job."
Paramedicine, he said, has traditionally attracted a different type of person than the health sector.
"It attracts a certain kind of person, somebody who's able to operate under a great deal of stress and make quick decisions. [To have] the adrenaline flowing that's kind of the environment we work in every day," he said. "So now to change that and to change the whole job into something else, we're going to lose a lot of good people."
On the Coast, Gibsons paramedic and union shop steward Charlie Greenaway said paramedics are in limbo as they try to figure out what this latest development will mean for them.
"We really don't know what's going to happen," he said. "There's lots of fear. The morale is absolutely shot."
Greenaway said that none of the series of government moves that followed the paramedics' eight-month strike last year have given him any confidence that the government is moving "in the right direction" to fix the ambulance service.
"We still have the retention problem. We still have a recruitment problem that's not been addressed or fixed, and I don't see them putting any more money into it. I see it going the other way," he said. "I have a fear that we're going to go backwards 35 years. I have a fear we're going to go back to the day of the guy with the pick up truck and a first aid kit."
