Local ambulance shortage getting worse
Posted Mar 8, 2011 03:43:41 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
The situation with the Region’s ambulance service is even worse than first thought.
Director of EMS, John Prno, gave an update to the Region’s Community Services committee this afternoon on how local ambulances are getting stalled at hospitals and sometimes not available at all.
But Prno told the council committee it was last month that was the worst month ever.
He gave examples of an ambulance that had to wait over eight hours at a hospital before there was room to transfer the patient inside.
In another instance, no local ambulance was available for four hours, meaning ambulances from other towns and cities had to be called in.
Prno says Valentine’s Day was in fact the worst day last month, with 32 delays in offloading patients, wasting 72 hours of ambulance time.
Prno says it’s a vicious cycle: hospitals can’t move patients out, so ambulances can’t move patients in, so they sit and wait and that means there are no ambulances sometimes.
But he says you can’t simply buy more ambulances and hire more paramedics, because you never know when this cycle is going to hit.
He told the Region’s Community Services Committee this afternoon all medical stakeholders in the Region are working together to come up with a solution.
But he says there is no easy solution, and this problem can’t be solved overnight.
Prno says while they are checking to see if one case of ambulance delay possibly contributed a person’s death, at this time the have no reason to believe any such delay has caused any death.
Prno wants the public to know, an ambulance is always coming, it just may be coming from very far away.
Here is a portion of Prno’s interview with 570 News…
