Mayor Greenwood-Speers goes provincial – Web Only Content

Jeff Green | Sep 06, 2023

Ever since she joined Frontenac County Council last December, Frontenac Islands Mayor Judy Greenwood-Speers has been advocating for a change in medical emergency protocol. Currently, only paramedics can transport patients to hospital. Local fire and emergency personnel, who routinely get the medical calls, because they are able to get to the scene more quickly than ambulances can, can do a limited number of procedures, including defibrillation, in order to stabilise patients until paramedics arrive.

Because there are no ambulances stationed on Wolfe Island, where Greenwood-Speers lives, the ambulances must take the ferry across, then drive from the ferry to where the patient is. Greenwood-Speers would like local emergency personnel, perhaps with the help of a decommissioned ambulance, to at least bring patients to the ferry to meet the ambulance as it comes across.

She floated that idea at Frontenac County Council earlier this year when the county formally decided to cease the 12 hour a day ambulance service on Wolfe Island.

Because of staffing shortages and other operational issues, that service was rarely provided in recent years, and the county decided to formally pull the plug and redeploy resources.

In response to Mayor Greenwood-Speers proposal, Gale Chevalier, Frontenac County Chief of Paramedic services, said that paramedics provide more than transportation. They are the outreach arm of a medical service that provides continuity of care from the ambulance to the hospital. She also pointed out that the contractual arrangement with OPSEU, the union representing Frontenac Paramedics, precluded such an arrangement between the county and local fire and emergency departments.

Undaunted, Greenwood-Speers used the access to the provincial government that is provided by the Annual Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO) conference in London, to bring her concerns about the situation on Wolfe Island and her proposed solution to Michael Kersner, the Solicitor General for Ontario, at an open forum.

At the meeting, she referred to a recent event on Wolfe Island. She said, according to a report on the news site Trillium.ca, that in this particular case, the ferry was on its way to Wolfe Island from Kingston and had to turn around and return to Kingston to pick up an ambulance before making the 20-minute trip to Wolfe Island. As the ambulance headed off to see the patient, the ferry left, only to be turned around on its way to Kingston, in order to pick up the ambulance with the patient.

According to a quote in Trillium.ca, Greenwood-Speers said that the “patient was just minutes from death” when arriving at the hospital.

Greenwood-Speers also said that when her late husband had cardiac events, she brought him to the ferry herself and transported him directly to hospital rather than wait for an ambulance.

Minister Kerzner said that the province was looking at measures to make better use of local fire and emergency departments, at medical emergency scenes, but did not refer directly to transportation, except to say he would talk to the Minister of Transportation about the matter.

Greenwood-Speers pointed out that in rural areas, across the province, the issue is distance instead of water, but the same circumstances are played out, as local emergency personnel arrive on scene well ahead of paramedics in many cases, but cannot transport patients.

She blamed the paramedic unions for stopping non paramedics from transporting patients, saying “they got that removed because they wanted more union people to be hired”.

Shauna Dunn, the President of OPSEU 462, which represents Frontenac Paramedics, told The Trillium that the real issue was not offloading transportation to local fire and emergency personnel, but properly funding paramedic services so the resources will be in place. She called Greenwood-Speers’ proposal “misguided.”

A ministry official reportedly approached Greenwood-Speers to discuss the matter further.