Hospital holding back paramedics
Re: Let’s work together, says hospital chief, Oct. 15.
The head of the emergency department at the Ottawa Hospital, Dr. Guy Hébert, qualifies as “unfair and unfounded” statements made by Anthony Di Monte, the city’s general manager of emergency and protective services, that “our paramedics are being held hostage by emergency department doctors.”
I, for one, praise Di Monte for raising awareness about this potentially life-threatening situation and would suggest that this serious issue should never be kept hidden from the citizens of this city. The reality is that paramedic resources are being “withheld” (let us not use the term “kept hostage”) from the community by hospital staff. This issue is not a new one; it has been going on for the last 25 years — and as Di Monte clearly indicates, is getting worse. Our city’s dedicated paramedics and paramedic communications officers (dispatchers) also share Di Monte’s deep concern.
Dr. Hébert calls upon us to “work together” and to “care for the patient in front of us.” These and other statements clearly show that he fails to consider that the paramedics’ work is on the front line of this community and that they will have greater difficulty responding to the next health emergency — cardiac arrest, diabetic emergency, respiratory crisis or motor vehicle collision — because paramedics are caring for a hospital patient who has been assessed by Dr. Hébert’s emergency department nurse (after being provided with a verbal report by paramedics), then assigned a triage level by that same nurse, who has opened a chart for that patient and even had a hospital identification tag applied to the patient’s wrist.
Have our city-paid paramedics become an easy “Plan B-staffing” solution for emergency departments — one that has no impact on his department’s budget? I would urge Dr. Hébert to consider the ethics of “withholding” paramedics from doing their duties in our community. While he is at it, he should also question the ethics of providing a six-patient quota (or is it five?) to emergency department nurses — a scheme that limits the number of patients a nurse can be assigned. We understand why the hospital has agreed to this quota, but paramedics cannot be used to fill in the staffing gap when a quota has been reached. It doesn’t sound like much of a partnership to me. I would also point out to Dr. Hébert that, for very obvious reasons, paramedics, paramedic communications officers, police officers and firefighters have no such workload quotas.
It’s quite simple: Having paramedics care for patients in hospital hallways results in fewer available resources in the community, thus longer response times for critical health emergencies occurring outside the emergency department doors.
This is something Dr. Hébert fails to consider, and which makes his statement that “paramedics are our partners in care” beyond credulity.
Once again, I see no encouraging sign that this issue is being considered in a serious fashion by hospital officials. Please Dr. Hébert, fix your emergency department, and please return our paramedics to our community.
J.P. Trottier, retired paramedic 2017, City of Ottawa