Desperate times, unique measures

When a single-vehicle crash left three young children badly injured, it took a total of two hours and 20 minutes from the first 911 call for all the youngsters to be picked up by ambulance, while a first responder had to stabilize a victim's spine for most of that time.

This incident Feb. 15 in Annapolis Royal, N.S., is, unfortunately, all too relatable to medical first responders in rural communities across Atlantic Canada.

In nearby Bear River, the fire chief told Saltwire the longest medical call in 2023 was more than 4 1/2 hours, which involved a woman with a broken femur and broken hip.

HEALTH PRESSURES

Pressures across the health-care system are contributing to the increasing wait times. The emergency room in St. Lawrence, for example, has been closed for more than a year and a half due to staffing shortages.

The same issue is plaguing Prince Edward Island’s second-largest hospital, where the intensive care unit has been shut since May 2023.

Temporary closures like these, as well as the shuttering of entire hospitals in some Atlantic Canadian communities, mean ambulances are travelling farther. Then they arrive at emergency departments that are more crowded, often with people who don’t have a family doctor who could have addressed their issue before it became an emergency.

BREAKING POINT

In January, the average offload time at Cape Breton Regional Hospital was 201 minutes, compared to roughly 30 minutes during the same month in 2020 and 2021.

Meanwhile, people such as the young children in the Annapolis Valley car crash are quite literally left by the side of the road.

First responders and community members on Nova Scotia’s south shore are taking matters into their own hands, fundraising for an ambulance that firefighters can use to transport people to the hospital instead of waiting hours for paramedics.

"We know the regulations say we can’t do that, but it’s come to the point we’re going to do that,” Graham Dixon, deputy chief of medical and a fire captain in the Woods Harbour Shag Harbour volunteer fire department, told about 50 people who attended a Feb. 28 meeting to hear about the proposal.

SAFER TRANSPORT

Apart from safety concerns of having non-paramedics looking after critically ill patients, Nova Scotia’s legislation does not permit first responders to transport patients from scenes to hospital due to its contract with Emergency Medical Care Inc., a subsidiary of Medavie Blue Cross.

Dixon stressed the proposal is not an ambulance service, but is merely a safer way to care for people when paramedics can’t get there in a reasonable time.

No one wants to download this responsibility — and the liability — onto volunteers, but people are at their wits’ end.

“Transport them instead of waiting for hours, watching somebody die,” Dixon told meeting attendees. “We just want to give them a chance. Whether it makes a difference at the end of the day, at least we can say we tried.”

Without solutions from government, other Atlantic Canadian communities may also be desperate enough to try.