If ambulance wait times were eventually expected to improve after call priorities changed in 2014, that doesn’t appear to be the case, at least not in Burnaby.
Recently, city council asked staff to gather the data on response times by the B.C. Ambulance Service and wait times for the Burnaby fire department since the service’s Resource Allocation Plan was introduced, and the results are in.
According to a staff report, in the 2.5 years since the RAP changes, there has been no significant difference in ambulance response times.
As of the end of August of this year, ambulances made it to the scene before the fire department in eight per cent of the calls, compared to nine per cent in 2015 and 10 per cent in 2014.
This year, in 64 per cent of calls, the fire department waited between one and 10 minutes before an ambulance made it to the scene, compared 65 per cent in 2015 and 62 per cent in 2014.
The fire department has waited between 11 and 20 minutes for an ambulance to show up in 18 per cent of the calls, compared to 17 per cent in 2015 and 19 the previous year.
In five per cent of calls this year, the fire department waited more than 30 minutes for an ambulance, a figure that hasn’t changed since 2014.
The city never collected stats prior to the plan changes and therefore are unavailable.
Mayor Derek Corrigan called the numbers “unacceptable,” adding he is surprised there hasn’t been a bigger improvement in the wait times. He said he was expecting for the times to improve once the ambulance service worked through the protocols.
“It still is a problem for us because there are long wait times for some people,” he told the NOW.
Corrigan argued the city is “under ambulanced” and the fire department has been forced to fill in the gaps. He said he’s dreading a time the department is called from waiting at a scene for a bigger emergency like a fire.
“It’s frustrating, really it’s an ambulance call and we’re monitoring a patient for you, you would have far more complaints about your service if our firefighters weren’t there, and I think in many ways we take the heat off of them,” Corrigan said.
Meanwhile, it continues to be a busy year for the fire department.
The department responded to a total of 3,725 calls in the third quarter of 2016 and 11,109 for the entire year. By this time last year, the department had attended 10,421 calls
