In the scariest moments of their lives, Ottawans may not have to wait as long for help. To address increasing wait times for emergency aid, the Ottawa Paramedic Service will hire 14 paramedics and buy one new ambulance in 2018 with the $4.6 million increase to their annual budget. This is a 5.6 per cent increase in funds from 2017, according to the 2018 City operating budget.
Including the 2018 additions, Ottawa will have hired 50 paramedics and added six ambulances to their fleet since January 2016—a nearly 12.5 per cent increase in staff from 2015 numbers.
The 2018 budget is just the latest in a series of hikes that the city has made to try and keep up with increasing 911 calls and an aging population.
‘THE GREY TSUNAMI’
Darryl Wilton, president of the Ottawa Paramedics Association, thinks that the city needs to be looking to the future. “We know that our population is increasing, and we also know that our aging population is increasing. That’s what we call the ‘grey tsunami.’”
At the current rate, the city’s paramedics will have a hard time keeping up with increasing calls from the Boomer generation, Wilton says. Two thirds of 911 calls for paramedics in Ottawa currently come from people 55 or over. “The reality is that [as it stands], we can’t respond to all of their 911 calls,” said Wilton.
911 CALLS RISING STEADILY
Call volumes have been increasing substantially since 2013 but Wilton says budget makers are looking at old numbers.
“Funding for paramedics is always between two and five years behind,” Wilton said. “The paramedics of 2018 are responding to a call volume from several years ago.”
WAIT TIMES MAY BE WRONG BENCHMARK
Ottawa paramedics are required to reach 75 per cent of their life-threatening calls within eight minutes. However, in 2016, an audit of the Ottawa Paramedic Service found that the service was just shy of the goal. Meaning, for more than one out of four people calling in a life-threatening situation, they had to wait more than 8 minutes for paramedic attention.
But paramedics warn against judging the efficacy of the service based only on wait times. “You have to be very careful with any benchmark,” said Deschamps. “It’s not only about that target, we’re not going to be blinded by it,” he said.
Instead, Wilton suggests looking at other benchmarks like patient outcomes, though, these figures are not currently being reliably tracked.
Wait times are of particular concern for Ottawans in more rural communities like Carp and West Carleton. In 2017, the city redeployed their ambulance fleet to be operated out of one central location: 2465 Don Reid Dr. in the Heron Gate area of Ottawa, meaning that it can take longer for ambulances to reach calls outside the Greenbelt.
Though this means that eight rural ambulance stations are now without a dedicated ambulance, Coun. Eli El-Chantiry (West Carleton-March) is not worried about service to rural wards like his. “I have been assured that this change is neither a reduction in change nor a substantive change to the current […] model,” he said in an emailed statement.
Coun. El-Chantiry points to replacement programs like the Community Paramedic Program—a roving paramedic that does preventative house calls to reduce unnecessary 911 calls—as a suitable answer to the relocation of the main fleet.
Both Wilton and Deschamps say that it may be time to reimagine Ottawa’s paramedic service. While it is currently classified as an “emergency service,” they argue that paramedicine ought to be considered as a health care service instead. This would mean shifting more support behind services like the preventative Community Paramedic Program, in an effort to cut unnecessary 911 calls.
“We don’t view ourselves as a response agency anymore. If we were, there is no way we could keep up: we would be chasing our own tail,” said Wilton.