Getting better
Posted Apr 12, 2011 05:26:36 AM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
The ambulance shortage crisis in Waterloo Region saw some definite improvements last month.
So says the Region’s EMS Director, John Prno, who tells 570 News the number of times in March when there was no local ambulance available to respond to a call was much lower than in February.
He says there were twenty-one such occasions in March, called Code Reds, ranging in time from four minutes to 57 minutes.
That’s 30% fewer Code Reds than in February this year — the worst month since the ambulance crisis began last summer — and the average Code Red was ten minutes shorter, Prno says.
Also for March, Prno says the Region’s ambulances spent the equivalent of thirty-one 24-hour days waiting at hospitals to off-load patients for lack of bed space inside.
He adds while that too is better than February, it’s still higher than January and all of last year.
Prno attributes the improvements to a handful of changes, including keeping extra ambulance stretchers at hospitals now.
Prno explains, the extra stretcher means if there are two ambulances waiting to offload a patient at the same hospital, one ambulance crew can go back on the road with the extra stretcher, while the other crew looks after both patients.
Prno says another change is to have an ambulance on rotation between the three local hospitals when they get to a Code Yellow situation: having the minimum number of available ambulances.
And Prno says they’ve recently stopped sending two ambulances to certain situations, like a home birth, if for example there is a midwife present.
Prno says one death of an ambulance patient in February has been determined to not be the fault of an ambulance off-load delay.
He says that patient had suffered a heart attack, and even though the patient did wait in the ambulance, his condition did not deteriorate during the wait, and the delay made no difference in his passing.
Prno says he and his EMS staff are continuing to work with the hospitals and the Local Health Integration Network to further improve the situation — even the Ministry of Health has offered some suggestions.
