Ontario regions face ambulance pressures and province won’t release offload delay data – CBC
Several municipalities worried when no ambulances are available but Ontario doesn’t track it
Jul 20, 2023
Several Ontario municipalities say their paramedic services are under immense pressure, with worrying stretches of times during which no ambulances are available to respond to calls — but the province doesn’t track the problem.
The government does have data on the hours paramedics spend waiting in emergency rooms to transfer patients to the care of a hospital, which are often a key factor in ambulance availability, but won’t disclose it.
Some emergency officials and community leaders say more needs to be done to help paramedic services, but the lack of publicly available provincial information makes it hard to assess the scope of the problem.
“We just want to be able to have a baseline to say, ‘Oh, things have improved since 2020, since 2018,’ and being able to quantify the data so that when we do go to the province, or to our employers, we want to be able to go with solutions,” said Niko Georgiadis, chair of the CUPE Ambulance Committee of Ontario.
