Demand for ambulance service growing in Lambton County, but paramedics keep pace

Demand for ambulance service is growing in Lambton County but the amount of time it takes local paramedics to respond to calls remains on target, according to the county’s emergency medical services department.

A report on 2022 ambulance response times was delivered April 20 to a Lambton County council committee.

The county is responsible for ambulance service for Lambton’s 11 member municipalities, including Sarnia.

“We’re maintaining ambulance response times within the targets that we’ve set,” said manager Steven Turner. “We find the community is well-served.”

Turner said they have noticed “a bit of a trend that response times are slowing increasing.”

He said that’s “a function of the number of resources that we have remaining somewhat static.”

Lambton added 12 hours of ambulance service last June between 10 am and 10 pm at its Sarnia ambulance station.

That helped, Turner said, “but over the next several years we can anticipate our call volume growth to increase about six to seven per cent, which will start to dwindle the response time a little bit.”

Turner said the department is working on strategies to “address that and be able to get ahead of it, but for right now I think we’re in good shape.”

He said the department is preparing a new master plan for the next five years.

“I’m looking, community by community and station by station, to see what the impacts are,” Turner said. “We see different demographic shifts throughout Lambton County. Different communities have different rates of growth.”

Turner said the age of local residents is probably the largest factor.

“More than 50 per cent of our calls are for those age 65 and older, so as baby boomers start to get a little bit older, we start to see an increase in our call volume that outpaces the population growth,” he said.

“We need to prepare for that and make sure we have the skills, training and resources where we need them.”

The report said staff “are also reviewing whether the base station locations may need to be adjusted to address increasing demands for service.”

An updated master plan, including demand forecasting and service chance recommendations, is expected to be delivered to county council by June.

Lambton County has about 165 paramedics on staff, divided between full and part-time, at nine ambulance stations with a total of 11 vehicles, Turner said.

In 2022, Lambton’s paramedics responded to 35,450 calls for service.

The report notes Sarnia and Lambton County have avoided issues with ambulances being left parked at hospital emergency departments waiting for patients to be admitted.

It’s “a big testament to our partners at Bluewater Health,” Turner said.

“They work very hard to make sure we’re turned around pretty quickly as soon as we get to the hospital. We haven’t seen the off-load delay issues we’ve seen in other communities across the province.”

Lambton’s ambulance service went through a three-year provincial service review in 2022. It’s designed to ensure services are meeting quality standards set by the province, Turner said.

“We did quite well,” he said. “They complimented us on the work that we’re doing.”

Turner added, “We had a couple of minor findings which we accept and we’ve taken immediate steps to make sure those are corrected.”

The issues included incidents of not providing proof that updates to standards, legislation and policies were communicated to all active staff, other paperwork issues, as well as issues with fully staffing all ambulance shifts due to staff shortages, according to a county report.

“As with most of the health care sector, and as we’re beginning to see in many sectors beyond the health care sector, human resources becomes a challenge,” Turner said.

“We’ve got an open posting right now” and would “love to see resumes” from qualified paramedics, he said.

“We’re working with our labor partners as well to try and improve the situation.”