Perth County Paramedic Service meets all response-time targets in 2024

For the first time since 2020, the Perth County Paramedic Service met all of its ambulance response-time targets in 2024.

At the March 6 Perth County council meeting, paramedic services chief Mike Adair presented the paramedic service’s annual update, which included statistics on ambulance response times in the county across all six categories of calls for assistance, which include vital signs absent (VSA) and all five levels of the Canadian Triage Acuity Scale (CTAS): resuscitation (CTAS1), emergent (CTAS2), urgent (CTAS3), less urgent (CTAS4) and non-urgent (CTAS5).

“The response-time performance plan is a provincial mandate that all municipalities have,” Adair said. “Since I’ve been here, we haven’t changed any of our targets in the last five years. This year, we met all of our targets with our new deployment plan with, also, one of our busiest years we’ve had. Now, having said that, there’s always a caveat. You’ll see in the VSA category and CTAS1, there’s higher fluctuations, and we would expect that because the sample size is so low, it depends on where those calls are.

“We do our best but we have a rural system, so it’s going to take longer to get ambulances to rural calls than sometimes to the urban calls.”

According to last year’s statistics, Perth County Paramedic Service’s 2024 response-time targets are as follows:

• paramedics responded to 54 per cent of VSA calls within six minutes (the target is to respond to 51 per cent of VSA calls within six minutes);

• they responded to 71 per cent of resuscitation calls within eight minutes (the target is 70 per cent);

• they responded to 83 per cent of emergent calls within 10 minutes (the target is 75 per cent);

• they responded to 93 per cent of urgent calls within 14 minutes (the target is 75 per cent); and

• they responded 98 per cent of both less-urgent and non-urgent calls within 20 minutes (the target for both is 75 per cent).

In 2023, the paramedic service only responded to 46 per cent of VSA calls within six minutes; in 2022, they responded to 49 per cent of VSA calls within six minutes; and in 2021, they responded to 47 per cent of VSA calls within that time, missing the target in each of the previous three years. In 2021, the paramedic service also missed its target for resuscitation calls, responding to just 62 per cent of those calls within eight minutes.

According to Adair’s report to council, Perth County Paramedic Service does not yet have access to local fire-department data. As firefighters are often first on scene for calls involving sudden cardiac arrest or VSA, Adair indicated the paramedic service is working with local fire services on a data-sharing agreement to better reflect true VSA response times.

Thanks in part to a program launched late last year in partnership with the Huron Perth Healthcare Alliance aimed at reducing offload delay, the average time between a patient’s arrival at hospital and when paramedics fully transfer patient care to hospital staff went down in 2024 after it increased steadily in 2021, 2022 and 2023.

“Offload delay is something that we continue to focus on, as council is aware,” Adair said. “We have implemented an offload-delay program that’s funded through the provincial government and we’ve reapplied for further funding for the next year because we feel that it’s working. … It was implemented in December (2024).

“… We have noticed that throughout last year, collectively, our hospitals have provided a quicker turnaround for ambulances than in the past, and at our rural hospitals, like in St. Marys and Listowel, we saw a slight increase in terms of how long our ambulances were at those facilities, and we will continue work on that and make sure we are as quick as possible.”

The Perth County Paramedic Service’s target for transferring a patient to a hospital’s care after arrival at an emergency department is 30 minutes. In 2024, the Perth County Paramedic Service spent the equivalent of 25 12-hour shifts waiting at St. Marys and Listowel hospitals beyond the 30-minute target – up from the equivalent of 15 12-hour shifts in 2023. The paramedic service spent an equivalent of 59 12-hour shifts at the Stratford General Hospital beyond the 30-minute target during 2024, down from the equivalent of 77 12-hours shifts in 2023.  

In total last year, the paramedic service responded to 11,555 calls for service. Over the past two years, Perth County Paramedic Service has experienced a 6.8 per cent increase in call volume. Recent changes made to the service’s deployment plan resulted in a decrease by 32 per cent in standby vehicle movement – approximately 44,800 kilometres – while maintaining response times.