Ontario regions face ambulance pressures; province won't release offload delay data

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.

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.

Ambulance dispatch centres are mostly operated by the province, so they should be keeping track of how often there are no ambulances available -- situations known as code zero or code black -- said Georgiadis.

A spokesperson for Health Minister Sylvia Jones said the province doesn't track that because municipalities are responsible for ambulance deployment strategies.

Ontario generates monthly reports based on data from ambulance dispatch centres, including time paramedics spend waiting in ERs to transfer patients -- known as offload delays -- by hospital. But requests for the figures, including a specific request for the most recent report, went unacknowledged.