By Alyssa Julie
Ottawa’s faltering paramedic service too often has troubles responding to calls for help, says the grandson of woman who died waiting for an ambulance.
Cory Couturier, 23, says he is frustrated that response times are increasing, even though the city hired more than 50 paramedics over the last four years due to an inquest into his grandmother’s death.
His grandmother, Alice Martin, is proof that these delays are often a matter of life or death for many seniors he said. Martin, a 75-year-old Greely resident, died four years ago after waiting 45 minutes for an ambulance.
“All we are trying to do is spare another family the same grief we have had to deal with every day,” Couturier said at a meeting of the community and protective services committee this month. “We thought it was solved, but now everyone living in the city has to live in fear. The system has gone down the tubes.”
But while Martin’s family pleaded with the city to end ambulance delays, councillors quibbled over the Ontario government’s lack of funding for provincial health care. Hospitals that should be funded by the provincial government, they argued, are greedily consuming money meant for the city’s paramedic service.
“Every year we have to hire more paramedics to have them sit in hospital waiting rooms, instead of going out to pick up sick patients,” College Ward Coun. Rick Chiarelli says. “Why should a paramedic have to wait and sit there with someone who stubbed his toe?”
Anthony Di Monte, chief of the Ottawa Paramedic Service, agrees that the city should not have to pick up the hospital’s slack.
He has requested $3.1 million to hire 38 extra paramedics along with vehicles and equipment.
This number, however, only covers the funding needed to keep up with growth and an aging population. Another 48 paramedics are needed to replace those waiting at hospitals.
Chiarelli says he expects the city will provide the $3.1 million in funding, especially since the provincial government has already agreed to pay half.
The city has been grappling with providing timely ambulance service since it inherited the provincial paramedic program in 2001. It has greatly improved the service, says Di Monte, but is not meeting set targets.
Ambulances are supposed to respond to life-threatening calls in urban areas within eight minutes and 59 seconds, but ambulances only hit this target 64.5 per cent of the time according to Di Monte’s report. Response times are longer in rural areas, but the paramedic service is still not making these targets.
Di Monte says these ambulance delays are unacceptable. “What the paramedics do on a daily basis is save lives. So meeting the targets is important to us because it has positive impacts and outcomes for our patients,” he says.
Unfortunately, he adds, there is no “magic solution” other than hiring more staff to respond to the volume of calls the city receives.
In the last five years, he says, the number of calls has risen from 72,450 to 92,554. The baby boomers are also aging; so many callers require longer, more complicated care. According to a corporate environmental scan completed last year, the senior population (over 65-years-old) in Ottawa is expected to increase 50 per cent in the next 20 years.
In the end, says Couturier, the city needs to provide the funding required to meet the needs of the population, because nobody should have to wake up wondering “what if the paramedics had been there on time?”