A new report says soaring demand for ambulances is crippling the Ottawa Paramedic Service’s resources and putting the lives of patients at risk — particularly those most in need of urgent care.
The review, recently submitted to the city’s community and protective services committee, paints a dire picture of the state of paramedic service in Ottawa. Over the last five years, paramedics have seen response volumes skyrocket by nearly 25 per cent. Ambulances were dispatched 133,315 times within city boundaries in 2015 alone — a five-per-cent increase over the previous year. Seven per cent of those calls came from Somerset Ward, which posted the fourth-highest number of ambulance responses last year among municipal wards.
“This volume is a clear indicator that the demand for the Paramedic Service is increasing year-over-year and is outpacing staffing levels and vehicle availability,” the report reads.
The report also reveals that, for the first time, the OPS failed to meet council-set standards for response times. Making matters worse, the failures come in categories dealing with some of the city’s most critical patients.
Last year, the OPS only managed to respond to 73 per cent of calls for patients in life-threatening condition within its eight-minute target time — two percentage points shy of the council-approved minimum of 75 per cent. In cases in which patients were suffering sudden cardiac arrest, the results were just as startling.
Over the past two years, about 63 per cent of calls were attended to within the six-minute target time — again, two percentage points below the city-set threshold.
“The (Ottawa Paramedic) Service continues to experience a gap in the provision of service in responding to the most critical patients,” the report warns. “(It) has reached the point where it is no longer able to meet performance targets.”
The review cites sprawling geography, a spike in tourism and, mainly, a growing population of older residents as the key sources of strain on the OPS.
Nearly six in 10 patients attended to by paramedics in Ottawa are aged 55 and older. That’s a reflection not only of the population segment most likely to require medical assistance, but also of the Baby Boomer demographic spike now reaching their senior years.
Currently, Ottawa has the fewest paramedics per call of any municipality in Ontario. And with demand expected to continue to jump by six per cent annually for the next three years, city staff are recommending the addition of 38 paramedics to the OPS’s roster and the purchase of five new ambulances by 2018. The first round of new recruits could be on the ground by next August, pending council approval.
In March, city council approved the hiring of a dozen new paramedics in an effort to improve response times and offset the impact of resources being diverted from rural communities to more urban areas of the city.
“I have every confidence that the addition of 12 (full-time positions) in March and the (committee) approval of the report will mean that our paramedic service will deliver this life or death service in accordance with the approved policy,” said Coun. Diane Deans, who chairs the community and protective services committee.
But the approval was by no means a slam dunk. Emotions ran high when some committee members questioned the need for a more robust paramedic presence, suddenly making the debate very personal for one councillor. Holding back tears, Cumberland councilor Stephen Blais reiterated the importance of a rapid response to patients in cardiac arrests, saying the survival declines by 10 per cent every minute. Blais suffered a heart attack in 2013 while working out at a gym in Orleans and spent months recovering in hospital.
Deans said she believes the recommendations are sufficient to alleviate the service pressures on the OPS, but local paramedics are far from convinced.
“It appears the review does not provide surge capacity, but rather the bare minimum possibility,” said Darryl Wilton, the vice-president of the Professional Paramedics Association of Ottawa. “The call volume is so high in Ottawa that we have seen 13 ambulances from surrounding areas responding to our medical calls at the same time.”
The result, Wilton said, is that residents living in rural areas are at times left with few – if any – paramedics to respond to their emergencies.
“I’ve heard from paramedics in all of these regions that are very concerned for their communities and the families who live there,” he says.
Fresh off a round of mass layoffs and with a ballooning deficit to tame, Wilton says he understands the purse strings are tightening at City Hall, but maintains 38 additional paramedics won’t be enough to adequately address chronic understaffing at the OPS.
He added that it takes a dozen paramedics to staff just one ambulance, meaning the new recruits would only result in three new ambulances on the road.
“We’ll only have enough resources in place when we are able to manage our own call volume within our own geographical boundaries, without the need for surrounding municipalities to deplete their medical coverage in favour of our financial challenges,” said Wilton.
“Just one neighbouring municipality has responded to over 1,000 calls in Ottawa so far this year. If the OPP was responding to that many calls on streets patrolled by Ottawa Police, you know how that would play out.”