Saskatoon ambulance response times falling short of targets in some cases

According to Medavie Health Services – West, which provides ambulance services to Saskatoon and area, there are many reasons that response times haven’t hit the targets it would like to see.

Gerry Schriemer is the Chief Operating Officer for Medavie. He said it can be anything from call volumes to spikes in calls, to paramedics being tied up with a patient they’ve transported to the hospital and are waiting for a bed to be released.

“All calls are triaged, so we have our most life-threatening call to a very low acuity call,” said Schriemer.

A typical target for a very serious life-threatening call — or an ‘echo’ call — is a response time of just under nine minutes, 90 per cent of the time. Schriemer said last month Medavie responded to 2,664 calls. Fourty-two of those were ‘echo’ calls. Medavie responded in under nine minutes 62 per cent of the time.

When asked why Medavie doesn’t just purchase more ambulances if they are short on resources, Schriemer said the funding model has to be considered.

“So we’re a 24/7 ambulance service — so that’s two paramedics in a truck 24 hours a day, seven days a week for the year — the budget cost for that is just over a million dollars,” said Schriemer.

He said it’s a complex situation if you also consider that there is a shortage of paramedics to staff any additional ambulances as well.

Schriemer said they typically hire paramedics from smaller centres to come to the city to get more experience in a busier environment, so those centres then need to backfill. He adds, the colleges just can’t put out paramedics fast enough to keep up with the demand.

“We’re just getting to a point that in the next five to 10 years we’re going to be seeing a significant amount of retirements,” he explained.

Schriemer said while he’s always an advocate for more resources, there are other things to look at as well to help improve service.

Those include community paramedics who go to the patient’s home to help treat them, instead of transporting them to an emergency room.

“With some of our programs, response times to me are not an indicator of patient outcome, but they are an indicator of workload, ” said Schriemer.

He said during peak time Medavie has 11 ambulances scheduled. When it’s slower during the 2 a.m. to 7 a.m. hours, there are six ambulances available.