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Paramedic call volumes continue to spike even as response times fall

The region's top paramedic says crews are running from one call to the next sometimes before they're ready for reassignment
Waterloo Region Paramedic Services 3
CityNews file photo

Running from one call to the next, regional paramedics say they're at risk of being spread too thin.

The words of warning come as the region continues to both grow and grow older which could be part of the reason why paramedic call volumes continue to climb.

"Call volume increase from 2020 to 2021 was a 10 per cent increase which is over what we would expect from our Master Plan projections," said Stephen Van Valkenburg, Chief of Paramedic Services, Region of Waterloo.

The region's top paramedic says that amount of growth is a concern saying it's about three to five per cent more than expected and has resulted in new highs nearly every week for the past few months.

Interestingly, however, despite the increase in demand paramedics do seem to be able to respond as fast or faster than before.

"One of the oddity pieces, and it's a good news piece, is that our response time actually dropped last year," Van Valkenburg said. "80th percentile response time was eight minutes and 58 seconds which was 13 seconds faster than it was in 2020." 

That means eight times out of ten an ambulance is able to make it to a scene in less than nine minutes.

"But that does come at a cost that we have to have vehicles available to respond to that and that's where you might get into crews getting reassigned before they're actually ready to be reassigned to calls," said Van Valkenburg, adding crews also still need to take extra pandemic measures like gowning and masking for every call.

The paramedic chief says the service will likely be asking the region for more resources in the 2023 budget but he says one of the main issues continues to be offload delays at the hospitals.

"Ultimately, this is a provincial responsibility, a health system responsibility, it's about system flow, it's not something that paramedic services can resolve," he said. "So the province needs to step up and come to the table to resolve that issue."