Northern Ambulance Planning a Mess Editorial

Jeff Green | Jul 07, 2011

For a couple of years now, Frontenac County and North Frontenac Township have been torturing each other over the location of an ambulance base to serve the north end of Frontenac County.

The complications that have stalled the project have arisen partly because it is a new attempt for the county and the township to work together to build an ambulance base and fire hall together in Ompah. Frontenac County and North Frontenac Township have deep-seated communications problems on both the staff and political levels. One side often does not understand the other and when they do understand each other, neither likes what the other party is saying.

All of this is further complicated by the fact that the county never wanted to build a base in Ompah in the first place; they wanted to build one closer to Sharbot Lake and Highway 7.

Ultimately the county thinks that North Frontenac is stalling because they do not want to pay their share of the costs, and the township thinks the county is stalling because they do not want the project to go forward.

The latest report to county council on the matter, which is being considered this week, says the whole thing should now be put off. Why? Because the location of the base was predicated on the fact that Lennox and Addington made a commitment two years ago to keep both their Denbigh and Northbrook bases up and running, providing service for the western half of North Frontenac.

As News readers will know, that is now in doubt thanks to a new consultant’s report to Lennox and Addington County. Paul Charbonneau, Chief of Paramedic Services for Frontenac County, now says that any final recommendation regarding the location of a northern land ambulance station should be deferred until Lennox and Addington decides what to do.

We have seen these debates about service to the north end of Frontenac, and Lennox and Addington counties before, and now we are seeing them again.

At the root of the debate is cost, and how this impacts on county budgets. Secondarily there are issues around the relationship between counties and townships, and ultimately between the ratepayers in the more populated areas to the south and those in less populated areas to the north.

Yet the ambulance service in the Province of Ontario is supposed to be seamless. When a call comes in to the central dispatch, the ambulance that can get to that call the fastest is sent, regardless of political boundaries. When that call is paid for, however, the question of who will pay for it must be considered.

The most expensive aspect to the system to fund for both Frontenac and Lennox is not the cost of sending out an ambulance; it is the cost of having two paramedics sitting in a relatively remote location, waiting, sometimes for days, for a call to come in. Whoever is paying that cost is seeing the largest impact on their annual emergency services budget.

This entire situation came about because of the downloading of land ambulance service from the Province of Ontario, which took place under the Mike Harris Conservatives. Before the service was downloaded, the province had a direct relationship with privately and publicly owned service providers, and while the downloading has achieved some streamlining of the system, it also shifted much of the costs from the provincial budgets to municipal budgets.

It also politicised the decision-making about where ambulance bases should be located, and on the levels of service offered at those bases.

The problem with all of this is that local politicians, who are charged with serving the interests of their own constituents, are being left with decisions about locations of ambulances, which are part of a seamless province-wide system that is crucial for people in life-threatening situations.

The managers who run the service for the local counties, are expected to understand the big picture, but they are ultimately employees of the ratepayers and are responsible to their own county budgets.

The difficulties faced in Frontenac and Lennox and Addington Counties right now, which are coming to a head this summer, are the net result of a failed system. If not the provision of ambulance service, at least its costing needs to be done on a province-wide basis.

No matter where in Ontario someone lives, no matter where they are visiting, when they have occasion to call an ambulance it is an emergency. They need service, and they need it right away.

Right now, the future of service in both Addington Highlands and North Frontenac is tied in with political infighting and financial questions in both counties and even the City of Kingston as well.

As we head towards a provincial election in the fall, we will have the opportunity to ask politicians representing the two political parties who are responsible for the current ambulance funding system, the Liberals and the Conservatives, what they plan to do about this.

The province is not about to take up the entire cost of delivering ambulance service. They could, however, take some responsibility for funding rural service as a provincial priority. Education funding contains a component for rural and northern service, and ambulance service needs the same kind of category.

One other thing has slipped under the radar in the discussion over base locations. Paramedics who serve in the northern reaches of Frontenac and L&A still receive less training than those in the south. So, if you are planning to have a heart attack, have one while visiting Loughborough Lake instead of Big Gull Lake. Not only will an ambulance arrive sooner at Loughborough Lake, but the paramedic who arrives will be able to put an IV line in.

At Big Gull Lake, there will be no advanced care paramedic, and no IV line.

This is the case despite the fact that the paramedic who attends at Big Gull Lake would like to be able to put an IV line in, but the training is too expensive, and too much money was already being spent paying for that paramedic to wait for the call to Big Gull Lake to come in.