Skip to main content

EMS response time reports delayed two years

The provincial government has slowed down the implementation of the new response time standards for emergency medical services. A revised provincial regulation now allows municipalities two more years before they must report on response times and their response time plans.


On September 17, 2010 Regulation 368/10 came into effect, amending the earlier Regulation (257/00) on response times. Under Regulation 257/00, municipalities were required to submit a response time performance plan to the government by 1 October 2010 for the following year.   Under the revised regulation, municipalities will now have until 1 October 2012 to do this. When filed with the Ministry of Health these plans will be publicly available.


Given the overcrowding in hospitals and the attendant backups in Emergency Rooms and "offload delays" for paramedics, the government probably appreciates putting off the reporting of the local plans until after the next election (now less than a year away). The delay will make it less likely that poor response times become an election issue. 


Regulation 257/00 also required the municipalities to report the following:


1. The percentage of times that a person equipped to provide any type of defibrillation has arrived on-scene to provide defibrillation to sudden cardiac arrest patients within six minutes of the time notice is received.


2. The percentage of times that an ambulance crew has arrived on-scene to provide ambulance service to sudden cardiac arrest patients or other patients categorized as CTAS I (i.e. the most urgent cases) within eight minutes.


3. The percentage of times that an ambulance crew has arrived on-scene to provide ambulance services to patients categorized as CTAS 2, 3, 4 and 5 within the response time targets set by the municipality.


With the regulatory change, municipalities will not have to report this data until March 31, 2014, instead of March 31, 2012. (A similar delay is also applicable to reports to the Ministry for EMS dispatch response times for CTAS 1 patients.)


The original regulation raised some question of a new and expanded role for fire fighters on EMS sudden cardiac arrest calls, as it opened up the possibility of fire fighters (or others persons equipped to provide defibrillation) "stopping the clock" on at least one form of response time for these calls.  


The Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO) says it worked with the Association of Managers of Emergency Medical Services of Ontario (AMEMSO) to seek these changes, arguing that the delay "will ensure all have appropriate access to the necessary data upon which to base local response time standards."


The development of EMS response time standards was the result of the joint provincial-municipal Land Ambulance Committee established in 2006.
 
dallan@cupe.ca
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
16 comments
Read more

Are health care administrative expenses out of control in Ontario?

The Progressive Conservative government has justified its health restructuring plans with the claim that administrative expenses are much higher in Ontario than in Canada.  When introducing the reforms, health minister Christine Elliott  claimed , “Over the last five years, Ontario has spent 30% more than the Canadian average in administrative expenses on its health care system.”   Elliott did not indicate her source of information. Presumably, however, the Progressive Conservatives are referring to the CIHI simplified and user friendly “ Your Health System ” graphs. Those graphs show “administrative expenses” in Ontario at 5.8% in Ontario while it is 4.5% in Canada.   This CIHI measure is actually fairly narrowly defined. It is the percentage of “the legal entity’s” total expenses associated with the administrative, finance, human resources and communications functional centres. However “the legal entity” used for this estimate is [1] only...
Post a Comment
Read more