Fire Crews Shifting How They Respond to Medical Calls

Vancouver Fire Rescue Services is taking a step that signals the pressure medical call volume is placing on the city's emergency response system. Crew members at some firehalls are starting to limit the types of medical calls they respond to—a significant change in how the service operates.

Firehall No. 2, located in the Downtown Eastside, offers a stark example of the strain. In the first quarter of 2026, the station responded to nearly 6,000 apparatus runs—a 51 percent jump compared to Q1 2025. More than half of those calls were medical in nature, not structural fires.

The pattern reflects a broader trend: emergency rooms across Canada have become de facto first-response systems for mental health crises, substance use emergencies, and non-emergency medical situations. Firefighters, trained and equipped for life-threatening scenarios, are increasingly deployed for calls that might be better handled by paramedics, mental health teams, or social workers.

VFRS leadership acknowledges the crunch. Responding to ever-rising medical call volume is placing a strain on firefighter capacity—they're deployed on non-fire emergencies so frequently that actual fire response gets squeezed. The solution, apparently, is selectivity about which medical calls warrant a full fire crew dispatch.

This reflects a city-wide conversation about emergency service redesign. Other cities have experimented with co-response models pairing firefighters with mental health workers, or with paramedic-only responses for lower-acuity medical calls. Vancouver is clearly feeling the pressure to make a change, even if this initial move is just triage. The question is whether limiting fire response to medical calls will free up capacity for fires, or simply shift the burden elsewhere.