P.E.I. making slow progress on ambulance holdups at ERs

While the wait time for an ambulance on P.E.I. is increasing in most areas, the province is making some progress in reducing the amount of time ambulances are held up waiting to release patients to emergency department care.

In September, a report by CBC P.E.I. found ambulances could be tied up at hospitals for six to eight hours, unable to respond to another emergency call, while paramedics waited for their patient to be admitted to the emergency department.

"We're facing a staffing shortage, a crisis actually," Jason Woodbury, president of CUPE Local 3324, the union representing the Island's paramedics, told Island Morning host Laura Chapin.

"We don't have the resources on the Island to have vehicles tied up in the emergency department for long periods of time. The system is fragile and there is many times that we don't have vehicles to respond to emergency calls."

The problem is contributing to an increase in the time Islanders are waiting for an ambulance to arrive, he said.

Provincial records comparing the last quarter of 2020 to the last quarter of 2021 show the following changes.

But while overall waits are mostly up, the province has seen some improvements in getting ambulances in and out of emergency departments.

According to Medavie, the company that operates Island EMS, there were 18 incidents in the last half of 2021 where ambulances had to wait five hours or more. So far in 2022 there have been just three. Health P.E.I. said the average wait time at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital has been cut in half, to about 19 minutes, and the average at Prince County Hospital is down 10 per cent to 13 ½ minutes.

While the situation is frustrating, said emergency room physician Dr. Trevor Jain, he doesn't believe the province should follow the example of other provinces, such as Ontario and Nova Scotia, which have assigned an emergency room nurse to care for patients before they are admitted, freeing up the paramedics and the ambulances.

"Those are Band-Aids. That is not a solution," said Jain.

"Emergency departments I worked with in Ontario, they had hired an extra nurse to look after offload patients on the ramp. But what do you do when the ramp becomes full? Do you now go to the garage, do you now go to side of the road."

The problem, said Jain, is not in the emergency department, and the solution should not be looked for there. The problem is with capacity across the system, resource problems that land Islanders in the emergency department because they don't see anywhere else to go.

A recent Canadian study found only 15 to 20 per cent of people in emergency departments needed the specialized care offered there, said Jain. If the province improved long-term care, mental health services, primary care, and allowed other health-care providers practise to the full scope of their abilities, problems in the emergency department would go away, he said.

Health P.E.I. chief operating officer Corrine Rowswell agrees the problem is not in the emergency department.