Solving ambulance delays

With hospital cuts, there has been some problems with ambulance offload delay, as paramedics wait longer to offload their patients to overloaded hospital staff. As noted earlier, Niagara region reports a 68% increase in offload delays

This in turn puts pressure on EMS response times as paramedics are forced to wait in ERs.

Some municipal leaders have mused about sending more fire trucks to EMS calls, as a way to respond to this problem.

But fire trucks are among the most expensive items for municipalities. The 2007 Performance Benchmarking Report (from the Ontario municipal Chief Administrative Officers and City Managers) reports that each fire vehicle cost $281 per in-service hour in Hamilton, $284 in Toronto, $239 in London, $270 in Thunder Bay, and $207 in Ottawa. The median cost for urban municipalities was $239 per hour, the same as the Toronto rate.

In contrast, one hour of in-service ambulance time cost $147 in 2007. With a $92 differential that means a savings of $184,000 for 2,000 hours of service, if emergency medical services are provided by an ambulance and paramedics rather than a fire vehicle and firefighters.

Part of this differential is likely the high number of managers in Fire Departments. Fire Departments run at a staff to management ratio of 4:1 whereas EMS averages 9:1.

dallan@cupe.ca

Comments

Too many public sector workers in Ontario?

Opponents of public services often try to portray the public sector as having grown disproportionately. In fact, since 1976, the number of public sector employees has not quite kept pace with the population. In 1976, the number of public sector employees in Ontario as reported by Statistics Canada averaged 830,800. By 2012, the number had increased to 1,330,700 -- a 60.2% increase. That sounds like significant growth -- true. But the population has increased from 8,413,779 in 1976 to 13,505,900 in 2012, a 60.5% increase. In other words, population growth has run slightly ahead of the growth in public sector employment. In 1976, close to 10% of the population worked in the public sector. It stayed pretty much this way until the Mike Harris government came to power when it dipped below 9%. It returned close to the historical range in the last six years or so, declining in 2012 to below the 1976 averag...

Huge cuts in public sector wages predicted

The Ontario Financial Accountability Office (FAO) says that, with inflation, real wages in the public sector will decline 11.3% over the three year period 2021/2 - 2023/4 . This would radically deepen the trend towards lower wages during the last ten years. The FAO reports that since 2011, the average annual salary for the Ontario public sector employees (defined here as employees of schools, colleges, provincial government, provincial agencies, and hospitals) has increased by $10,385 -- or 1.6 per cent on average annually. This is the lowest increase of all the sectors and lower than inflation, which averaged 1.8 per cent per year. Over the ten years that would be about a 2% pay cut. The FAO reports that wage settlements were the lowest in the provincial public sector over the last decade: Hospital Wages Especially Challenged: The FAO predicts hospital wages will increase even less than in the public sector -- just ...

The hospital crisis: No capacity, no plan, no end

While Canada has achieved universal public healthcare coverage, that does not mean conservative forces have given up trying to erode that coverage and expand corporate care where it does not currently exist. The battle has become particularly intense in Ontario under the Ford Progressive Conservative government, which is implementing serious cuts to the level of care and moving to bring in for-profit mini-hospitals. Inadequate Staﬃng. Less and less of hospital spending is on staff. Employee compensation as a share of hospital expenditures has consistently shrunk in Ontario. This is not some immutable law of hospital development. It is in stark contrast with the rest of Canada, where compensation has become a larger share and now accounts for 67.1%. Hospitals in provinces other than Ontario now have 18 percent more staﬀ per capita than hospitals in Ontario. Overall, if Ontario had the same staﬃng capacity as the other provinces and territories, there would be another...

Defend Public Healthcare

Search This Blog