Non-emergency ambulance service is cost-effective fix, minister says

New Brunswick's new non-emergency ambulance service will be efficient and cost-effective and keep emergency response vehicles on the road, the health minister said Tuesday.

Ted Flemming suggested the new system was an obvious solution to problems with delays and short-staffing that have plagued the ambulance service.

Premier Blaine Higgs announced Monday that Ambulance New Brunswick will create a dedicated service for non-emergency transfers of hospital patients — a move designed to take pressure off ambulances responding to urgent calls.

The patient's language of choice will be determined beforehand, and it won't be necessary to use bilingual staff, which is a requirement with urgent response teams, he said. 

"Patient transfer by an emergency first-response vehicle and team of paramedics doesn't make any sense," Flemming said.

"Why it took so long — to me, it was self-evident and I just hope in my career as minister of health, every issue that comes before me is as easily dealt with as this is."

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Under the current system, Flemming said, a patient in Doaktown uses an ambulance to travel 84 kilometres north to the Miramichi Regional Hospital for dialysis twice a week, which uses up an ambulance for emergencies.

"That's a controlled situation … it's not an emergency, it's something that's done twice a week," he said.

"But when an ambulance is doing that, that ambulance is out of service in the event of an emergency."

Designing a different system

Chris Hood, executive director of the Paramedic Association of New Brunswick, is optimistic about the new plan, but he said there is not one specific solution to deal with the issue of transfer services.

"We take the premier and the minister of health minister at [their] word, that they feel this is the first step in what will be a significant amount of work to get the paramedic system to the place it needs to be and one of the best in the country," Hood said.

He said patient transfers alone are a "big and complex" issue in the province and make up about 30 per cent of calls. Until now, they have also been subject to the same bilingualism requirements as emergency calls.

He said the association will continue advocating a greater role for the regional health authorities in transferring hospital patients.

It sends them a message that they're going to have better ambulance service than there was before.- Ted Flemming, health minister

"Certainly, if it means getting patients moved between health-care facilities, which is a significant issue, and if it means paramedics being able to respond to 911 emergency calls in a quicker timeframe, then we support it," Hood said of the new non-emergency transfer system.

"But I think the jury is still out a little bit and will depend on how it's rolled out."

Forty unilingual paramedics who are now casual employees will be hired as permanent employees for the transfer service.

Higgs told reporters that Medavie, the company that manages Ambulance New Brunswick, has told him this should free up enough bilingual paramedics for the organization to meet language requirements on emergency calls.

'Not a language issue'

But during an interview with Information Morning Fredericton, Flemming said New Brunswick's ambulance crisis is not a language issue but a labour-shortage issue, "which endangers the lives of all of New Brunswick."

He said the new service, which is expected to start in March, sends a message to all New Brunswickers that "they're going to have better ambulance service than there was before."

Service to free up response times

Medavie CEO Richard Losier said Tuesday that determining a person's language of choice up front "will save a lot of headaches for a lot of people."

"All the details, we're working on them as we speak," he said of the new service.

Losier said Medavie hopes to dedicate 24 vehicles with teams of two paramedics that will focus on non-urgent transfers across the province.

When it comes to emergency response, Medavie will continue to respect the Official Languages Act, Losier said, but the the new service will free up responders for emergencies. He said language ability wasn't the source of delays. 

"When we don't have vehicles on the road, it's because either the people that are supposed to be in the vehicles are sick … it's not because they can't speak French or English," he said.

- With files from Information Morning Fredericton, Information Morning Moncton