One local official feels the suggestions to emergency services from the province don’t actually fix the root cause of the problem.
Superior North EMS Chief Wayne Gates told Acadia News Thursday the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre (TBRHSC) has a capacity issue that hasn’t been properly addressed in over a decade.
In a memo this week from the government’s assistant deputy minister of emergency health services to paramedic chiefs, there is an encouragement to consider having paramedic crews tend to more than one patient at a time in hospital emergency rooms.
“(The suggestions) only delay the issue from getting resolved, and this has been going on for I’d say between 10 and 15 years,” Gates noted. “It’s very frustrating that this has been ongoing for so long and we still don’t have a solution.”
The memo also said that paramedics could take patients somewhere other than an emergency department, which may be a challenge considering under current law they’re still required to take people to hospital-based facilities, including urgent care centres.
NDP Leader Andrew Horwath said Thursday that it appears as though Premier Doug Ford wants frontline workers to just make do.
“When your loved one is rushed to a hospital in an ambulance, they need urgent care, not a plan to warehouse them in an ambulance bay or hallway with a single paramedic crew running back-and-forth between gurneys,” mentioned Horwath. “Our health care heroes, including paramedics and emergency department teams, are exhausted to their core, desperately need more staff, and deserve better than this.”
Gates noted that he has requested more funding help to expand the dedicated offload nurses initiative.
“When a paramedic takes a patient to emergency there’s a dedicated nurse assigned to those patients,” Gates explained. “Right now, that nurse is only dedicated to 12 hours a day, seven days a week, and with the staffing challenges at Thunder Bay Regional has been experiencing that person isn’t always available.”
Created in 2008-2009, the initiative aims to reduce ambulance offload times by providing municipalities with funding for dedicated nurses to offload patients in hospital emergency rooms.
Thunder Bay is also one of 33 municipalities involved in a pilot project announced in 2021 to allow paramedics to take palliative care patients to a hospice or treat them on scene for pain and symptom management.
