Centretown needs at least 17 paramedic units on duty at all times if the area is to be served adequately says Jean-Pierre Trottier, the Ottawa paramedics’ spokesperson.
Despite being considered a high-priority area, because of the population density, Centretown is often left without ambulance services because of a shortage of paramedics. And even when they are available, they can’t often respond within eight minutes and 59 seconds, which the city’s standard response time.
“In order to answer in less than eight minutes and 59 seconds around 17 paramedics should be available at all time in the downtown area,” says Trottier.
But, he says, it often happens that fewer paramedics are available in the high-density area of the city including Centretown. The area represents 25 per cent of all life-threatening calls.
A report on paramedic service presented to the city community and protective services committee recently indicates that in the last four month, there were times almost every day when no paramedics were available to answer to life-threatening calls.
“If you look at the whole geography and the whole city, Centretown was the last place to not have any ambulances. It happens everywhere else but now it’s in Centretown, too. It gives you some scope of the magnitude of the problem right now,” says a senior Ottawa paramedic who did not want to be identified.
He says areas such as Kanata, Barrhaven or Orleans were often affected by “level-zeros”, when no paramedics are available to answer to life-threatening calls, because units are sent to Centretown.
“If we only have one, two, three ambulances, that was always a problem for the last two or three years for Kanata, Orleans or Barrhaven because the paramedics would be coming from downtown. But, now when there is zero, it’s a problem for everybody,” the paramedic adds.
“If you can picture the climate at the paramedic service, everybody is walking on glass,” he says.
Last year, an extra 38 paramedics were hired by the city bringing the total to 345. But those have not kept pace with the increasing volume of calls. As a result, the report recommended the hiring another 145 more paramedics over the next three years at a cost of $5 millions. Diane Deans, coun. for Gloucester-Southgate and chairwoman of the committee, says she supports the report recommendations.
The dispatch system used in Ottawa was criticized last week by Anthony Di Monte, the paramedics’ chief and Steve Kanellakos, the deputy city manager.
Trottier says the supervisors at the dispatch centre send page notifications to paramedics to inform them when only a few units are available in the city. But sometimes they can’t notify paramedics because they are doing several tasks at the same time.
“Supervisors are often on the phone answering to the 911 emergency calls,” he says. Situations where less than eight paramedics are available can go unnoticed, according to Trottier. “We want to have a software that is going to detect them automatically without relying on a person who is doing two or three things at the same time”.