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Fire chief questions wait times
Up in vapour:
Students are smoking e-cigarettes in local schools, but the district has no plans for a specific ban, as the devices should be covered under the current smoking rules.
Cornelia Naylor staff reporter
Burnaby’s fire chief doesn’t think a 90year-old woman with uncontrolled bleeding from her head after a fall should have to wait one hour and 23 minutes for an ambulance to bring her to hospital. But that’s what happened in January after B.C. Emergency Health Services downgraded certain types of medical emergencies last October. The woman’s case is one of 11 in Burnaby since October in which patients have had to wait more than one hour for paramedics. There were also 67 incidents of ambulances taking more than half an hour to arrive, and one 60-year-old woman waited for two hours after injuring herself falling down a flight of stairs. Such wait times, detailed in a Burnaby Fire Department report to Emergency Health Services vice-president William Dick last week, are unacceptable, according to local fire chief Doug McDonald. “There’s a moral issue here that we should do the right thing, and this is not the right thing,” he said. B.C. Emergency Health Services has been criticized by fire departments around the province since it downgraded 74 types of emergency calls in its resource allocation plan (RAP) from Code 3 – lights and sirens – to Code 2 – routine. McDonald said the new policy, which was adopted without consulting with fire chiefs, is flawed. Besides increasing wait times for calls now deemed routine, it ties up firefighter resources since fire crews still respond to the calls the way they always have and won’t leave a patient at the scene once they arrive. In a Tuesday press conference defending the new protocol, however, Health Ambulance Page 4
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City students ‘vaping’ in school Jennifer Thuncher contributing writer
An increasing number of Burnaby secondary students are “vaping,” and it is sometimes happening right under teachers’ noses. Vaping is puffing on electronic cigarettes (also know as e-cigs, or vape pens), which release a steam-like vapour. Electronic cigarettes, which are marketed as smoking cessation devices, come in various shapes, sizes and flavours. Some resemble real cigarettes, complete with an end that lights up to simulate burning tobacco while others look like oversized pens. It is the pen variety some Burnaby teens said they see kids smoking, sometimes right in school.
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“You see random puffs of smoke sometimes, and I have actually seen them in our classrooms, students trying to hide them from the teachers,” said Sydney Landrie, a Grade 10 student at Moscrop Secondary. Another Moscrop student, Csaba Laszlo, said he started noticing kids using electronic cigarettes at school about three months ago. “It is really out in the open,” he said. Electronic cigarettes were recently banned in Vancouver schools, and the Fraser Health Authority is currently contacting all its school superintendents to make them aware of concerns around electronic cigarettes and to recommend the devices be added to the school smoking bans. According to the Burnaby school dis-
trict spokesperson, Burnaby has no plans for a specific electronic cigarette ban for Burnaby schools because the current smoking ban covers all types of smoking. “The safety of (electronic cigarettes) has not been demonstrated,” said Fraser Health’s medical health officer Helena Swinkels. “There are many compounds in them and some compounds, including for example propylene glycol, have been shown to be respiratory irritants and, with longer term exposure, has been shown to be associated with asthma and other respiratory difficulty in children,” she said. Of further concern to the health Smoking Page 4
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