'We keep getting lucky': Orleans explosion highlights need for 'level 0' solution, paramedic association head says

The head of the Ottawa Paramedic Association says the issue of "level zero", when there are no ambulances available to respond to 9-1-1 calls, needs a stronger solution than simply hiring 14 new paramedics.

The city's emergency preparedness and protective services committee was told this week that there were 1,819 level zero events in Ottawa in 2022, more than double the number reported the year prior.

Offload delays at hospitals, where paramedics must wait for patients to be admitted before they can be cleared to respond to another call, totalled more than 74,000 minutes in 2022.

Darryl Wilton, president of the Ottawa Paramedics Association, told Newstalk 580 CFRA's Ottawa Now with Kristy Cameron that the city can't continue to see these kinds of delays.

"Absolutely, it's a public safety issue," he said, "and somehow we keep getting lucky. You've covered the story with the explosion in Orléans that happened, and we got lucky that that didn't produce dozens of patients. If we have a scenario like that, we are squarely behind the eight-ball."

Wilton said the city's budgeted plan of hiring 14 paramedics this year will not make much of a difference when it comes to the scale of the problem of level zero incidents.

"When you look at a number like 74,216 (minutes), it's hard for people to put that into context. What does that mean? How many hours are lost? How many days are lost?" he said. "You're looking at more than 1,200 hours or 51.5 days where there's no ambulance left to respond."

He said if you lumped all of the time lost to those offload delays into one continuous stretch from the start of 2023, it would be the equivalent of Ottawa having no ambulances at all until Feb. 20 at noon.

"It's incredible to think about that, and you have to look at, okay, you throw 14 paramedics at a problem that big—it's nuts to me," he said. "It takes 12 paramedics to staff one ambulance 24 hours around the clock because of the way the shifts work. That means communities will still not have coverage and people with life-threatening emergencies are going to continue to wait."

Wilton said paramedics says solutions to the problem, which has been worsening over the years, have not made a difference.

"We've tried to come up with little system efficiencies to try to make improvements. We've put paramedics in hospitals, we've treated patients at home under treat-and-release protocols, we've put paramedics in street outreach settings, we’ve had paramedics creating offload specialist positions at the hospitals to try and free up other resources, we have community paramedics treating people in their homes—outpatients from hospital so we don’t have to take them back to hospital—we've had paramedics giving vaccines… anything we can do to keep people out of the hospital and stop going into that vortex where we basically get sucked down a drain, never to return again, we've been trying to avoid all of that," he said. "Every time we add some sort of new efficiency, it seems the hospitals just get busier and we get more resources sucked into those corners."

All levels of government need to spend money to fund paramedics on the front lines, he said.

Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe told 580 CFRA that he shares the community's concerns about the high number of level zero events in the city and he heard about it a lot on the campaign trail when running for mayor.

"We are working on it in a number of different ways," he claimed. "There are more paramedics that we're going to hire in 2023. That's in the budget, if it's approved on March 1, but there's other work that's being done as well, very important work with the local hospitals and with leaders in the health-care community."

Sutcliffe said he understands that if the system of offloading patients at a hospital doesn't change, more paramedics won't move the needle very much, but he didn't have any specifics to provide Tuesday.

"I think there are some big solutions coming. I'm not able to talk about them yet, but there is work that is being done on some major changes to how the offload would work at some of our local hospitals. If that were to happen, I think it would make a substantial difference," he said.

"I can't give you a timeline," he added. "It takes a lot of effort. We need to engage with the hospitals, with the provincial government, but there's progress being made. You'll know as soon as I can tell you."