Bicycle-riding paramedics prove their worth in large crowds
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By James Foster
Times & Transcript Staff


Maybe they don't have sirens, but Ambulance New Brunswick's bicycle ambulances have just about everything else they need to tend to the sick or wounded, right down to defibrillators and oxygen tanks.

GREG AGNEW/TIMES & TRANSCRIPT

During the Bon Jovi concert last year, paramedics Mathieu Haché, Lyle Wilson, Keith Guptil and Mathieu LeBlanc were on bike patrol.

ANB, formed in 2007 to operate ambulance services across the province, created the bicycle patrols as a means of more easily delivering medical services in big crowds, since bicycles are more mobile in such situations and are more readily accessible by someone looking for help.

So far, they're a big hit with the public, as seen at last week's downtown Mosaïq cultural festival, which drew thousands of people to the city centre, including many who stopped at the bicycles to chat with the mounted paramedics.
"Our paramedics really enjoy it," ANB spokeswoman Sophie Cormier-Lalonde says.
"They love the fact that they can interact with the public a lot more."

If you see one bicycle ambulance, another is always close by.

That's because each patrol wants to carry enough equipment as possible, to cover as broad a range of medical emergencies as possible, from a small cut requiring just a bandage to a full fledged cardiac crisis. So each of the two-bike teams carry half the equipment needed to provide a fulsome service, about 15 pounds or approximately seven kilograms each.

The patrols have proven equally popular with paramedics, as there is no shortage of them willing to trade an ambulance's gas pedal for a bicycle pedal. People just seem to flock to the bicycles, paramedics report. During Mosaïq, for example, two bike patrollers stood at the ready not far from an actual ambulance. While members of the public would routinely stroll up to the bike patrols every few minutes to chat, no one paid much attention to the ambulance.

"It's a great way to promote paramedicine as a career," Cormier-Lalonde says.
The bikes are used wherever large crowds gather: downtown festivals, Magnetic Hill mega-concerts, marathons and festivals.

During a half-marathon in Miramichi two weeks ago, the bike patrol was summoned by race watchers after a woman fell ill.

Their response time in the dense crowd of people: one minute, 32 seconds, demonstrating the utility of having paramedics on bicycles.

The paramedics keep in touch with dispatchers at all times, so they can be summoned by radio very quickly. As well, a regular ambulance is also dispatched when the bike paramedics are called out, though in a thick crowd it's often the more mobile bicyclists who get to the scene first.

And should the bicycle patrol come across a person in trouble who needs to get to a hospital, they'll call for an ambulance for that as well.

Bicycle-riding paramedics are used in other jurisdictions around Canada and the U.S., Cormier-Lalonde notes, and now for the past three years they've been proving their worth in New Brunswick as well.