Wolseley, Saskatchewan, is a small town that relies on both its own community and the neighbouring towns for emergency services such as police, firefighters, EMS and medical first responders. While not every service is based in town with local volunteers, volunteers and emergency personnel from surrounding areas work together to help residents and keep them safe during emergencies.
Police services when needed are provided by Indian Head with Wolseley paying an annual fee of $60,000 for the service. When talking to Mayor Gerald Hill, he said that the arrangement comes from it not being financially feasible for the town to have a station of their own. Along with no desire to establish one in the foreseeable future.
Wolseley also rely on their neighboring communities for ambulances and EMS. These services come from Grenfell, Indian Head or other nearby towns. Depending on the volume of calls, response times can be anywhere from two hours to ten minutes, with usually timely responses made.
While ambulances have to travel to Wolseley they aren’t alone, the town has a team of seven trained volunteer Medical First Responders to help. These first responders go to all kinds of calls such as for overdoses, vehicle accidents and medical injuries. Their job is to get there first and provide any assistance they can while keeping the patient stable until ambulances arrive.
“So when we get a call, we have all of our equipment at the fire hall. So we go to the fire hall and get our spine boards or trauma bag, whatever we need and we just go to the call. We do all the assessments, all of the vitals, pretty much everything. We are trained in splints, so when the ambulance comes we have everybody all packaged up and ready to load into the ambulance,” said Kim Baran, a Unit Clerk at the hospital and one of those volunteer First Responders.
The only calls they don’t answer are domestic violence with police involved or suicide. “Police will attend first and then make sure that everything is safe before they let EMS in,” Kim said.
Wolseley’s fire department is made up of a team of 18 volunteers. Fire Chief Randy Quintyn owns and runs Wolseley Service, an auto shop in town. With him we discussed balancing work and volunteering, what their job detailed as well as some history.
“I mean it’s just part of being on the fire department. The alarm comes in, I leave. That’s all it is too it. As far as managing it and everything, I mean we have a meeting once a month and I got a few other good members that are good at checking equipment and making sure everything is working.” Randy said, in response to balancing owning the shop and being chief of fire.
“Rural calls are probably 75%, maybe even 80% compared to in town calls. The last couple of years, we’ve had three house fires, and before that I like it was like 20 years since we had a house fire.” Randy said, when asked what calls they got the most in town fires or highway accidents and farm fires.
All together Wolseley is a small town where the people are its heart, and they do what they can to keep it beating.
