by Karla Wilson

"It’s an amazing crew of people. There’s no group like them, in my experience."

This is how Jennie Helmer, Chief Operations Officer for BC Emergency Health Services (BCEHS), describes the employees of the provincial ambulance service where she is an integral member of the executive leadership team.

Jennie Helmer in uniform 2024

This passionate, driven and personable leader started her own paramedicine career at the age of 19 and has moved up the leadership ranks over the past 31 years. She currently oversees all provincial operations for the organization. With an impressive resume of professional, personal and educational accomplishments, Jennie says she frequently stops to remind herself of why she works in pre-hospital care.

"As I’ve moved into successive layers of leadership, it pulls you away from initial patient-paramedic interaction," she says. "I try to pull myself back to that all the time. That is the piece we’re all here to try and improve."

In 1993, Jennie was pulling espresso shots at a West Vancouver Starbucks when she started having conversations with local paramedic crews. The British Columbia Ambulance Service (BCAS) had been operating for 19 years at the time, and less than one quarter of its employees were female.

"The Lions Bay ambulance crew would come in for coffee," she recalls. "I’d make them coffee and talk to them. Sometimes they’d be sitting there, and their pagers would go off."

One day, Rosalind MacPhee, the late unit chief for the Lion’s Bay station, came into the coffee shop and invited Jennie to ‘ride third’ with her and a paramedic crew so she could see what the work was all about. Jennie agreed, and not long after her ambulance ride-along, MacPhee supported her application to become a paramedic.

The rest of Jennie’s story involves decades of hard work, personal sacrifice and a passion for pre-hospital emergency care.

But even before thoughts of paramedicine had even entered her mind, her journey involved focus and dedication.

"I grew up in West Vancouver and my family owned a potato farm in Pemberton,” Helmer says. “We started potato farming in 1980, using my grandfather’s old equipment from the 1940s. It was labour-intensive."

Jennie, her parents and two sisters went back and forth from their house to their farm every weekend and holiday from the time she was seven years old. When she was 12, she decided she wanted to live and work on her uncle’s 1,000-acre cattle ranch near Williams Lake, B.C. for a year. Jennie convinced her mom to let her go, then completed her grade eight education at a school of 40 total students in Alexis Creek.

"It was a defining moment in my life," she says. "I was living this life of independence and a lot of responsibility. It was calving season when I first arrived, and I just loved it. Every day was an adventure, and I’ve always been so grateful to my parents for letting me do it."

A self-determined young woman, Jennie traveled throughout Australia and southeast Asia after graduating high school, taking odd jobs to fund her travel adventures. When she came back to Canada, she found a job as a barista at her local Starbucks. This one decision would pivot her life and career trajectory towards a profession she hadn’t yet contemplated: paramedicine.

"I was hired into the service and had an amazing mentor in Rosalind [MacPhee] and first Unit Chief Gayle Lyttle. There were almost no female unit chiefs at the time, and yet I had access to two brilliant female leaders – and their focus was on ensuring that all new paramedics had the training they needed, understood the job, and had a place to go that was comfortable to debrief after bad calls."

MacPhee, a well-respected community member and legend at BCEHS, later went on to receive the Order of British Columbia in 1996.

"This was a UC who took her time with all new employees for training and orientation,” Jennie continues. “There was that spirit of: ‘You’re coming into a new organization and we’re going to take care of you.’ I had a fortunate entry into the system."

After Jennie joined BCAS in August 1993, she went on to work at various ambulance stations on the Lower Mainland as a primary care paramedic (PCP) for 19 years and finished her Bachelor of Commerce degree in 2009. She then pursued further clinical studies and became an advanced care paramedic (ACP) and provided advanced life support care to patients in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and Surrey.

"It was so rewarding to have the skills and tools to treat people differently. I loved the people I was working with, and I’m not sure I’ve ever had so much fun, enjoyment and fulfilment,” Jennie says. “But there was also stress as we were seeing the opioid crisis take hold. I remember the day when we had 12 opioid overdoses, and that had never happened before."

Jennie became a paramedic specialist in 2016. In this newly developed role at BCEHS, she provided support to paramedics across the province, which involved talking her colleagues through medication administration and decision-making on extra challenging calls.

"This was a new opportunity for the organization: that concept of peer consult,” she says. “It’s a relationship based on a mutual understanding of the uncontrolled environment paramedics work in. B.C. was on the pointy end of that concept. We had a lot of different thinkers here."

Jennie remembers her time working as a paramedic specialist with good humour. At five feet, three inches tall, she says she was constantly being asked by her patients if she was okay.

"I would pull up in a paramedic response unit, and I’m not very tall,” Jennie recalls. “I’d get out and have all my gear together: my backpack, suction – and by the time I got to my patient I looked like a turtle."

"Historically, the paramedic has been a man who can carry all this stuff, no problem. But everybody can do this job – and I knew I could do it,” she continues. "The doors were starting to open."

Jennie continued her solo paramedic specialist work for three years while also pursuing her Masters of Education, which she received in 2018.

"At the time, the organization was thinking about how to create a model that can handle the new reality of increasing and complex demand, on limited resources – and that was the paramedic practice leader and research lead role,” Jennie says. “Again, I felt I walked into a place that was such a great challenge for me – and an opportunity to explore models of care."

This new model brought about BCEHS’ Clinical Hub and the concept of low-acuity patient care.

"We moved from the concept that everyone calling 911 is calling for the same reason,” Jennie continues. “But we didn’t really understand who our caller was. The original model built in 1974 hadn’t changed until 2019 – there is something fundamentally wrong with that when the patient population has changed. We had an aging population with more complex problems."

Jennie’s career at BCEHS continued to flourish as she took a director role for the operations of the Fraser Districts, then became the senior provincial executive director for the province’s dispatch centres and Clinical Hub.  She also completed an MBA in 2023 and has been studying as a PhD student at UBC’s School of Population and Public Health since 2020.

In January of 2024, Jennie Helmer became Chief Operations Officer for BCEHS – a role that places her in the most senior leadership team of the organization. She is one of four women on this team of six.

“There has been a common thread with all my roles,” Jennie says. “I’ve loved stepping into the unknown and being able to bring together a group of people to solve some of the challenges that really are front and centre for BCEHS. I also like thinking of the older challenges, too – the ones we haven’t yet been able to solve.” 

From starting her career as an ambulance paramedic to now helping lead the organization, Jennie’s path has taken her on a journey she feels grateful for.

"I grew up in the system," she says. "It’s been luck, but it has also been very deliberate. I want to be here, and I want to do this work. What’s kept my fire really going is that desire. It’s a comfort place – trying to find solutions to problems."

In addition to Jennie Helmer’s accomplishments at BCEHS, she has been published in numerous medical journals, was elected as a three-time councilor on the Village of Pemberton’s council and was awarded the prestigious Emergency Medical Services Exemplary Service Medal from the Governor General of Canada in 2019.

Outside of the workplace, Jennie stays equally busy. She and her partner Suelyn, an RCMP Corporal, have a tenacious and adventurous four-year old son, Baxton. Jennie says he "loves to know the rules but not follow them."

L to R: Jennie, Baxton, Suelyn at a Remembrance Day ceremony.

Jennie’s knack of tackling complex situations, adapting to changes, and overcoming difficulties ultimately helps patients and keeps the organization running efficiently. But she always comes back to her days working directly with patients.

"Everything we build has to have that at the centre. No matter who’s working on what, it’s always about that,” she says. “I have kept that as my tether."

In Jennie’s current role, she continues to draw on the courage she learned as a street paramedic for so many years.

"Paramedics have to exercise human courage on a daily basis," she says. "They live with uncertainty and work in uncontrolled environments. They sweat, they bleed, they burn in the summer and freeze in the winter. They find out how much more a human can do, and they do a little more. They reach beyond themselves. Patients rely on paramedics to have this courage every day."

Jennie says she also sees courage as learning to speak up when something isn’t right and to fight for the things that matter. In her current leadership position, Jennie calmly and firmly exercises these traits as she helps to drive BCEHS forward.

Jennie Helmer speaking with BCEHS colleagues at a Chief Ambulance Officer’s Commendation ceremony in Vancouver in 2023.