ALYSSA SCHWARTZ
CTV News Staff, Oct. 18, 2002
A CTV News investigation has found a critical backlog in Canadian emergency rooms is costing ambulance crews thousands of hours annually. Delays in transferring ill patients to the care of doctors mean fewer crews are on the road, available to handle other critical cases.
Across the country, emergency rooms are filled beyond capacity. Patients crowd the halls waiting for beds, while ambulances are turned away from hospital after hospital in their search for a care centre with room to admit new patients.
Emergency crews are facing the brunt of those delays, sometimes forced to wait hours to offload their patients. The process of explaining a patient's case and filling out paperwork, which comes before a stretcher is cleared to head out to another emergency, is one that should take paramedics only about 35 minutes.
But CTV News found some cases in which emergency personnel weren't cleared for more than six hours, leaving a gaping hole in the availability of emergency care.
"There is a consistent increase in the time we are waiting in emergency rooms across the country," says Paul Morneau, president of the Paramedic Association of Canada.
"It's not uncommon to hear of wait times of two hours, and then you hear of three, four, seven, eight, 10-hour waits, where paramedics are stuck with patients on stretchers in Emergency, waiting for care. And, of course, when a paramedic is stuck for that many hours, they are not responding to other calls in the community," Morneau told CTV's Avis Favaro.
Calgary normally has 32 ambulances on the road to handle emergencies. But with 4,500 hours lost in the first seven months of this year, offload waiting times are threatening the city's ability to care for patients. A few weeks ago, the Alberta city felt the strain of the problem when it was left with only a handful of paramedics on the road.
"We had only two (ambulances) available for a population exceeding 900,000. That's quite a concern to us," says Mike Plato of Calgary Emergency Medical Services.
"We want to be on the streets doing our job," says paramedic Drew Nelson. But with emergency rooms backed up, Nelson admits that's not always possible.
"It's not uncommon for us to sit here for an hour and a half or longer. The longest my partner and I have had was six hours."
The problem is not limited to Calgary. "It's bad in Vancouver, Montreal, Halifax, Toronto," says Morneau.
In Ottawa, a record 12,000 hours have been lost so far this year by crews waiting to offload patients, CTV has learned.
"That's the equivalent of having two ambulances, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, taken off the road, lost to the system," says Anthony Di Monte of Ottawa Emergency Services, which transports approximately 45,000 patients every year.
With over 11,000 hours lost in the first nine months of 2002, Toronto is facing a similar strain.
That number is up from the 2,520 hours ambulances spent in offloading time in all of 2000. One recent night, there was not a single ambulance available to treat the city's three million residents -- all of the city's crews were waiting for patients to be admitted to area hospitals.
Comparable data was unavailable for Montreal and Vancouver, but both cities are reportedly suffering similar problems, as are all major Canadian urban centres, the Paramedics Association of Canada says.
"We have identified a crisis that needs to be handled now," Di Monte told CTV. "Not doing so would be irresponsible."
The solution, experts say, isn't putting more ambulances on the road -- it's making more room for patients in Canadian hospitals. With no new beds, a slew of new emergency personnel would only spend their time waiting for patients to be admitted.
"When we get stuffed full of patients in emergency, then the new people coming in by ambulance have no place to go," says Dr. Garth Dickinson of Ottawa Hospital General Campus.
Emergency workers say unless things change, it's a matter of time before the backlog takes its toll on Canadians' health.
"My fear is that if it keeps on that trend it's going to hit a day that someone will call for an ambulance and there won't be one there," says Dallas Pierson of Calgary Emergency Services Dispatch.
"It's about your mother, your father, your child, at home (or) in the community, who is having a heart attack or choking. And the paramedics, because there's so few of us out there able to respond, can't respond to that emergency," Morneau says.
With a report from CTV's Health Reporter Avis Favaro
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CTV News: Paramedics waiting in ERs instead of working, Avis Favaro reports
