Fixing Hamilton’s ambulance crisis
Imagine calling 911 for a loved one, but you’re told that you will have to wait for the urgent help you need because no ambulances are available.
That’s happening more and more in Hamilton because ambulances are often stuck in hospital parking lots, waiting for emergency room beds to free up so they can drop off their patients and get back on the road.
Last year, paramedics spent over 32,000 hours waiting to drop off patients at packed ERs. That backlog led to 97 “code-zero” incidents, where no ambulances were available to respond to emergencies. That means families calling 911 are left waiting for urgent medical help.
Paramedics on the front lines tell us they feel stuck. They want to be on the road helping people in emergencies, not waiting around in emergency hallways as the calls pile up and become unmanageable.
The bottleneck affects ambulance dispatchers, too. They often have to stay on the line with families stuck waiting for an ambulance, trying to keep them calm, while new callers are stuck on hold.
These dispatch workers share horror stories — a grandmother in cardiac arrest, a helpless mother forced to wait on hold while her baby chokes, a young person hit by a car — and worse. They’re also caught in this failing system, suffering from PTSD and burnout. When it’s your job to facilitate lifesaving care, you have to expect to have the tools you need, but Hamilton’s emergency health-care workers routinely do not.
Since Hamilton’s first reported code zero in 2006, provincial governments have proposed Band-Aid solutions that simply haven’t worked.
The latest so-called solution from the Ford government is to ask paramedics to do more with less, “batching” patients in hospital hallways. That’s fewer health-care workers caring for more sick patients while they wait hours for a bed. It’s a recipe for disaster.
The only true solution to the codezero crisis is fixing the problem upstream, in our hospitals. Hamilton needs more resources to reduce the burden on overcrowded emergency rooms and to end hallway health care. That means investing in expanding capacity and creating more beds, and more nurses and health-care workers to staff those beds.
The current and past governments failed to keep up with the demands on our hospitals. They froze hospital budgets for decades and created the hallway medicine crisis. According to the financial accountability officer, one of the province’s fiscal watchdogs, Ontario consistently has among the lowest amount of per-capita health spending in the country. No wonder Hamilton hospitals are routinely operating at over 100 per cent capacity.
The cost of doing nothing is high. It cost Hamilton taxpayers $5.6 million to have ambulances waiting around in parking lots last year. That number doesn’t include the human cost of strain on front-line workers, and the health impacts on patients waiting in pain for hours.
It’s Hamiltonians who are paying the price for the callous inaction and underfunding by successive provincial governments and the costs are only piling up the longer we wait to act.
We need a government that will invest in our health-care services, make sure we have enough hospital beds and health-care workers, and finally end code zeros.
The province has failed residents in our community. Paramedics and dispatchers can’t be asked to do more with less any longer.
Hamilton families deserve to have confidence that an ambulance will arrive quickly when they call in an emergency — and that their government will prioritize funding to save lives.
SANDY SHAW IS MPP FOR HAMILTON WEST-ANCASTER-DUNDAS. MARIO POSTERARO IS THE PRESIDENT OF OPSEU LOCAL 256, REPRESENTING PARAMEDICS. PATRICK FRY-SMITH IS PRESIDENT OF OPSEU LOCAL 201, REPRESENTING HAMILTON AMBULANCE COMMUNICATION OFFICERS.