A young mother from Embrun wants an investigation after it took an ambulance half an hour to respond to her call about her baby. Four-month-old Benjamin was having multiple seizures, his lips were blue.
Claudia Gorenko lives about 40 minutes south east of Ottawa in an area served by the Prescott Russell paramedic service. That paramedic service has enough ambulances but they were busy helping out in other municipalities that were short, including Ottawa. That's the way it works.
The problem, though, is that's leaving folks like Claudia and her baby in a potential crisis where every minute counts.
Bubbling with life, exploding with personality, little Benjamin is the picture of health.
“It's very difficult to imagine he has seizures,” says his mother Claudia Gorenko, as she watches over him, “because he's otherwise perfectly healthy.”
He's had seizures since he was born; Gorenko says doctors aren’t entirely sure why. But February 1st, they were particularly bad.
“I had to perform mouth to mouth because his lips were turning blue,” she says.
CHEO told Gorenko to call 911. She did and was told by dispatch that it might take between 30 minutes and an hour to get to her house.
“I was shocked,” she says, “he could seize again.”
After 29 minutes, help arrived. Gorenko has since learned that the call was initially given a level 3 priority, instead of a level 4, the highest. In addition, there were issues with availability of ambulances.
“They were actually the second ambulance sent to my home,” she says, “The first one was sent from Embrun. It would have been here within minutes, it was a block away from my house but dispatch called them and rerouted them to another call in Ottawa.”
It's a growing concern for communities outside Ottawa. The Land Ambulance Act of Ontario requires that the closest ambulance to a patient must respond to a call. Many county ambulances end up in Ottawa as demand in that city grows, creating what Prescott-Russell’s mayor calls a “black hole” where their ambulances are in Ottawa, dropping off patients at the hospitals there, and constantly being re-routed into calls within that city, putting rural residents at risk.
“Someone could die,” says Pierre Leroux, the Mayor of the Township of Russell, “Is that what we're waiting for, someone to die before we take action? This has been an ongoing problem, we have been trying to work with Ottawa but they have no interest in working with us.”
Prescott Russell had a 10 year contract with Ottawa, in which the service with the higher number of calls would compensate the other for those excess calls. That contract expired in December of 2015. The chief paramedic for Prescott Russell, Michel Chretien, says that in 2016, Prescott Russell saw a 250% hike in net calls that taxpayers in his county had to pay for, amounting to between $500,000 and $750,000, with most of those calls, he says, coming from Ottawa.
The city of Ottawa says its call volume is increasing each year and that's it is trying to address that by hiring an additional 12 paramedics in 2016 and plans for another 24 in 2017 and 14 more in 2018. Peter Kelly, Chief Paramedic with the Ottawa Paramedic Service said, in an email, that “the Ottawa Paramedic service responds into surrounding municipalities as well,” and that “Given the ongoing investigation by the Ministry of Health and Long Term Care’s Emergency Services Branch involving the Ottawa Paramedic Service, the City can’t comment any further.”
But Michel Chretien says the situation with Ottawa isn’t even close to balancing out.
“I don't mind helping our neighbors to respond to a crisis or am emergency or big situations,” he says, “but not on a daily situation, it's abnormal to do that. Police and fire don't do that.”
As for Gorenko is she worried about the next time? Well, that already happened this Saturday when Benjamin seized again.
“The decision was made, why risk waiting 30 to 60 minutes for an ambulance. It is 25 minutes to CHEO. My neighbor and husband loaded up together and drove him.”
Gorenko has asked that the Ministry of Health and Long Term Care to investigate her call.
Representatives from Prescott Russell plan to meet with Ontario's Health Minister next week to talk about this as well.
