Fort McMurray (Alberta, Canada) Fire Department will spend the remainder of the year testing a new system to stop fully trained paramedics from attending low-priority emergency calls. Those paramedics also will stop attending high-priority scenes in ambulances, instead riding on fire trucks, reports Fort McMurray Today. Until 2009, paramedics will only be sent to the Charlie, Delta and Echo 911 calls, which require advanced life support. All other calls will be handled by firefighters who are trained EMTs.

“I think it was necessary to provide a better service to our citizens with limited resources,” Tom Klein, assistant deputy chief of rural operations at Regional Emergency Services, told the paper. “We grow so fast, we can’t keep up with our infrastructure in the rest of the city and we can’t keep up in the fire department.

The fire department ran a similar trial in March at the Thickwood Heights fire hall. The trial was ultimately unsuccessful and the department conducted a second trial to clarify language and institute more accurate measures.

“One issue was our 911 dispatch,” Tany Yao, assistant deputy chief of operations at Regional Emergency Services told the paper. “It was the terminology that they were using, just the way some things that were dispatched were being inappropriately dispatched. This is clarifying the language to be more specific.”

Not everyone is pleased with the decision, however. Brad Grainger, president of International Association of Fire Fighters Local 2494, says the fire department’s management team has not adequately justified its reasons for the trial, and that the department did not notify the public of the service change during the previous trials.

“The problem is that we’ve gone from one trial to another trial to another trial to another trial, and there is no stats that bear that it’s working or it’s not working, or that we do or we don’t need to go in this direction,” Grainger told the paper.

Yao told the paper that he hopes the change will help the department provide more consistent care in response to emergency calls.