Paramedic Presentation To Frontenac County

Jeff Green | Apr 25, 2013

Over 30 paramedics from the Frontenac Land Ambulance Service attended a meeting of Frontenac County Council last Wednesday. They were there to support Chief Steward, Shauna Dunn, who made a presentation about Council’s recent decision to cut a 12-hour day shift at the Palace Road ambulance base in the City of Kingston.

Although none of the councillors addressed the paramedics, they had to notice them because they were wearing bright yellow t-shirts with the slogan “Cuts to your ambulance services can cost you, your life.”

“The demand for emergency medical services in Frontenac County and the City of Kingston has been increasing by almost 12% year over year since 2009,” Dunn told Council.

“We, as paramedics, have very serious concerns about the implications of the various budget mitigation strategies presented to Council for the 2013 budget. The elimination of one ambulance, four full-time paramedic positions, is of particular concern given the direct impact on the front-line emergency service resources … most, if not all, of the ambulance services in this province have been advocating for enhancements of service, not reductions. Frontenac County will thus have the dubious honour of leading the way in discovering the true cost of cutting ambulance resources in the face of an ageing population, increased demand for medical service, and the impending crisis in our health care system as a whole,” she added.

She also made reference to statements made by Paul Charbonneau, the Chief of Paramedic Services for Frontenac County, to CBC News in February, about the need to prepare for what he called a “tsunami” of demand for service as the baby boomer population bubble ages over the next 20 years, and wondered how this jives with making cuts to local service.

When the shift cut was announced, Charbonneau said that the service will still be able to meet the response time standard that it set for itself last fall, a standard that has been accepted by the Ministry of Health.

That standard is for a response (by a paramedic or a first response vehicle) to a cardiac arrest within 6 minutes, 48% of the time. The response time to all high-priority calls is for a paramedic to be on scene within 8 minutes of the call coming in 68% of the time, and to other priority calls within 10 minutes, 65% of the time.

These standards include rural and urban calls, with rural calls most often being ones where the standard cannot possibly be achieved.

The cut in service at Palace Road will affect service throughout Frontenac County, Shauna Dunn said.

“The ambulance stationed in Snow Road, Parham, and Sydenham will undoubtedly have to provide emergency standby coverage and to respond to emergency calls in/around Kingston even more frequently than they do now, subjecting county residents to even longer response times than they are used to.”

The 12-hour day shift at the Palace Road base, which also operates two 24-hour ambulances, is set to take effect on May 20. The announcement of the shift cut came just days after OPSEU Local 462 launched a grievance to the Ontario Labour Relations Board over the county's recently adopted practice of not replacing workers who call in sick during certain shifts. That practice was designed to save 5,000 hours in labour costs in 2013.

The sick time policy, which was designed to give management time to determine why sick time has risen dramatically among OPSEU Local 462 members in recent years, was immediately abandoned when the grievance was launched.

The shift cut could save more in labour time than the sick time policy was designed to save, over 8,700 hours.

The collective agreement between Local 462 and Frontenac County expires at the end of the year.

A few weeks ago, Chief Charbonneau told the News that it is impossible to speculate on the impact of this measure on the tenor of the negotiations for a new agreement.

“A lot can happen in nine months,” he said.

The presentation by Shauna Dunn elicited no response from members of Frontenac County Council.

She was, however, warned twice by Warden Janet Gutowski that she was taking more time than was allotted to her presentation. She spoke for 12.5 minutes. The prescribed time allotment for public delegations is 15 minutes