Seniors who are not critically injured in a fall will no longer have to wait longer for an ambulance, according to the BC Emergency Health Services (BCEHS).
The provincial government agency has retracted its service level cuts to those injuries, according to a Richmond Fire Rescue (RFR) report to the city’s safety committee Wednesday.
That's good news for a city short on ambulances.
Last October, as part of a trial, BCEHS scaled back ambulance response times to 74 medical events, including falls, in order to respond faster to more critical injuries.
According to Richmond’s deputy fire chief Tim Wilkinson, nearly one third of all of the fire department’s medical calls over the past year have been affected by the new response protocol, which has resulted in a dramatic rise in ambulance wait times for medical events deemed non-critical.
Of RFR’s 6,687 total medical calls since last October, 2,303 were affected by the “downgrading,” in which an ambulance need not put its lights and sirens on.
Longer response times will continue for medical events such as abnormal breathing, sickness with abnormal breathing, motor vehicle accidents with unknown injuries, “dangerous” hemorrhaging, and trauma events with “possibly dangerous” injuries.
In response to these changes, the fire department also downgraded its responses, save for vehicular accidents, which it has continued to respond to with lights and sirens.
In Richmond, from October 2012 to October 2013, the average ambulance wait time for soon-to-be downgraded events was 4.8 minutes. Over the past year, following the change, the average wait time was 12.6 minutes.
Over the same periods, medical calls with a 40-plus minute wait time spiked from four to 91. Calls with no ambulance response went from three to 17.
As well, fire trucks were first on the scene to 304 more medical events than the year prior.
Mitigating some of the reduced services is a decision by BCEHS on Oct. 23 to “upgrade” possibly dangerous falls to a lights and sirens ambulance response.
Those events account for about 550 medical responses per year by RFR — or about 25 per cent of downgraded calls over the past year.
According to Wilkinson’s report, “there is uncertainty on whether or not the full 2013 (response) amendments will be put in place in the near future.”
If they are, RFR will not be called to any of the aforementioned medical events.
Wilkinson and the RFR are asking to be consulted, along with the city, by BCEHS before such changes are considered.
In October, Josh Henshaw, regional vice president of Ambulance Paramedics of BC, told the committee that Richmond is inadequately staffed for ambulance paramedics and staff and doesn't have enough ambulances.
Richmond has two ambulance stations with a total of five ambulances serving the community of 210,000 residents.
Henshaw said optimal ambulance response time is nine minutes. He said Richmond's ambulances serve incidents at Vancouver International Airport. At times, Richmond has been left without an ambulance for calls, thus requiring one from another municipality to drive into the city to attend to a patient, said Henshaw, according to the meeting minutes.
