A new era for EMS in Saskatchewan is on the horizon, as the Sask Health Authority is looking to get work started on a provincial strategy.

The SHA wants to look at all of the different ambulance services in the province and see how they are currently running and how they can be improved. Planning for the change should start by August once they go through provincial data.

Rod MacKenzie, Executive Director Provincial Services - Community Care had this to say:

"We just created the new structure recently and right now we are just trying to get the leadership structure for EMS in place, but our goal is to have a strategic plan for EMS provincially. In the past there's been 12 health regions and within those regions EMS has evolved a little differently, so there's actually not a lot of consistency, there's a lot of variation."

The SHA are looking at the services EMS provides and how they can make improvements.

"There won't be 50 different services in the future, they'll all be one big service under the provincial program. As far as the privately contracted operators go, a lot of those contracts are 30 years old and are in desperate need of updating. This year we will have 26 ambulance services renegotiating their contracts."

"This is a really exciting time in the province. We've never had an opportunity to create a provincial EMS strategy, so this is a really exciting and interesting time. I used the term the other day 'It's a new era for EMS in this province', so I think we're going to do some really good things."

There are also two levels of ambulance service that they would like to make available in all communities - advanced life support and basic life support.