Sick time, overtime soar for Winnipeg paramedics and firefighters – Winnipeg | Globalnews.ca

Sick time and overtime are skyrocketing for Winnipeg firefighters and paramedics, much higher than in years past.

Overtime is up more than 40 percent, from just over 110,000 calls last year to 154,126 so far in 2022.

Sick days are also seeing a sharp uptick with a 58 percent increase from 10,535 calls in 2021 to nearly 17,000 so far this year.

Christian Schmidt, head of WFPS, tells 680 CJOB that the system is under extreme stress.

“We are still realizing the impacts of COVID here in the fire paramedic service; we got hit at the beginning of the year,” he says.

The combined increase in sick days and overtime is attributed, in part, to the number of COVID-19 cases during the first quarter of the year.

But burnout and exposure to violence also increase workers’ stress levels, as well as creating staffing problems.

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“We’ve had a lot of people working flat out here … for months, and people are getting tired and it’s starting to affect our ability to staff all of our machines,” says Schmidt.

“We’ve seen in recent weeks where we’ve had occasions where units have had to be taken out of service, unfortunately, because we didn’t have staff available to work.”

Overtime costs and other salary expenses also have financial consequences, with the department predicting a $7.5 million overspend in 2022.

Schmidt says that WFPS is looking to hire more workers to mitigate staffing issues.

“We have already done our pre-planning for recruitment. We have 100 applicants ready to go who will be interviewing over the summer months,” she says.

“That will prepare us for our fall recruiting class and those will be classes for paramedic and fire operations.”

Schmidt says he will take a multitude of steps to ease current pressures.