Paramedic union local speaking out over ambulance shortages in Frontenac County

Jeff Green | Apr 27, 2022

Dave Doran is a paramedic with Frontenac Paramedic Services who works out of the Parham ambulance base in Central Frontenac. He is also the Acting President of OPSEU/SEFPO (Ontario Public Service Employees Union) Local 462, which represents the Frontenac Paramedics.

He is speaking out, with support from OPSEU, about shortages in staffing and other resources that is compromising the ability of Frontenac Paramedics to provide timely service to residents of the City of Kingston and Frontenac County.

Gale Chevalier, the Chief of Frontenac Paramedics, told Frontenac County Council during the most recent budget process in November, 2021, that the service is going to require more resources over the next couple of years as call volumes have increased and will continue to increase, to precent the service from falling behind optimal targets for both response times to urgent calls and unit hour utilisation, a measure of how often paramedics are called out.

Frontenac Paramedics are overseen by Frontenac County Council, which has committed to an incremental increase in service over the next few years.

But Dave Doran says that is too little, too late, and that Frontenac County residents are already seeing substantial decreases in service as ambulances that are based in South, Central and North Frontenac, and Wolfe Island, are often being diverted to cover for shortfalls in the City of Kingston.

“It is most extreme on Wolfe Island. Quite often Wolfe Island is not staffed at all,” Doran said.

He said that the 12-hour a day ambulance that is located at the Robertsville base in North Frontenac are often re-located to Parham on standby when Parham ambulance are called to standby in Sydenham, and there can be a cascading effect, pulling all Frontenac based ambulances into Kingston.

It is not only call volumes in Kingston that are responsible for this.

“Our services experienced over 3,700 down hours in 2020, which jumped to 8,800 in 2021,” he said. “Those are shifts are classified as downstaffed”

That translates to about 1 shift per day where the service was short of an ambulance at one of its Kingston or Frontenac locations.

As well, Doran said that orphan shifts are also becoming more common. Those are shifts where only one paramedic is staffing an ambulance, because their partner is either sick or unavailable and there is no one available to cover for them.

“In those cases, we can go to calls and provide emergency care, but we need to wait for another ambulance to come in order to transport the patient to hospital,” said Doran.

He said that it is also common for a rural ambulance to transport a patient to the Kingston Health Sciences Centre, which is the tertiary care centre for the region, and once they are there, “they end up being called out to calls in Kingston for the rest of their shift because it is so busy and dispatchers base who they send to a call on where ambulances are, not where their base is.”

As a result of these factors, it is not uncommon for Frontenac County for there to be a single ambulance, in Parham or Sydenham, to cover for all of Frontenac County, or none, with ambulances based in Lennox and Addington, Lanark, or Renfrew, being the called in when necessary to cover the slack. Ambulance dispatch in Ontario is centralised and borderless, the closest available ambulances is called upon to cover calls that come in.

“It used to happen, very rarely, that Frontenac County was not covered at all, when there was a major accident on the 401 or something in Kingston, but it is more common now,” Doran said. “I don't know how often, you would have to talk to management to find that out.”

Another issue that Doran flagged is a lack of ambulances.

“We are also short vehicles,” he said.

He said that neighbouring services, such as Lennox and Addington and Leeds and a Thousand Islands, have made the necessary investments to keep up with increased demands, but Frontenac has not.

“Also, contracts for community para-medicine and to help Public Health with COVID assessment centres have pulled in many of the part-timers that could cover shifts in the emergency services,” said Doran “These are good initiatives, but they are a drain on resources that are not there.”

When contacted, Kelly Pender, the Chief Administrative Officer of Frontenac County, provided background information.

“The County of Frontenac takes the health and welfare of all our employees seriously, including dedicated front-line paramedics and long-term care staff. The pandemic has had far reaching implications for every front-line healthcare worker in the Province,” he said.

He added that the county has been actively supporting paramedics on two fronts, “by leading and embracing the provinces community paramedicine program, and second by approving ongoing funding to implement increased staffing levels.”

He said that a full review of paramedic resources was done in 2019. As a result of the review, “the first step was to implement a new 12-hour shift was added in the west end of the City of Kingston in 2021.As part of the 2022 budget, council approved an ongoing increase to the budget to further increase the number of paramedics”.

He added that Frontenac benchmarks services against other services in Eastern Ontario, and a 4.5% increase in call volume is anticipated over the next 7-10 years.”

The News has asked for more specific information about the frequency of both “standby” and “down staffing” over the past year,

Frontenac Paramedic Services are in the midst of a hiring program that will end up brining 21 new paramedics to the service.

That will only help cover for pending retirements and increased sick times as paramedics are burning out”, said Dave Doran.

“We are trained to deal emotionally with bad calls,” he said, “but it is another thing to go from one bad call to another without even a 20-minute break for partners to check in with each other about how they are doing. This is all a consequence of being under resourced.”

In order to address the issues that OPSEU 462 is flagging, Doran said that one or two new 24 hour ambulances are needed as soon as possible, not later in the decade.

The costs are substantial to do this, because the vehicles themselves expensive, and it takes 8 full time paramedics to staff one new 24 hour ambulance.

Even if Frontenac County Council decided to accelerate planned timelines for increasing the number of ambulances on the road in Kingston and Frontenac, it would not happen immediately.

While all residents of Frontenac County and the City of Kingston pay the same amount for ambulance service through municipal taxes, decisions about budgeting are made by Frontenac County Council, and there has been friction between Kingston City Council and Frontenac County Council over the bill that Frontenac County submits to the City each year for the service.

It came to a head two years ago, when the City refused to pay increased fees that the County charged them, and the County threatened to launch court action to force the City to pay.

In the end, the City of Kingston decided to create a separate tax bill for ambulance service, so City residents would know that any tax increases for the service had not been approved by Kingston City Council.

Frontenac County will begin preliminary work on its 2023 budget in the coming months. Because 2022 is an election year, the Frontenac County budget will not be completed until February of 2023.