Blackville hopes for solutions from Ambulance NB after too many close calls

N.B. emergency rooms reopen Monday After several closures over the weekend, emergency rooms in New Brunswick reopened Monday, but staffing concerns remain.

The community of Blackville, New Brunswick is sounding the alarm over long ambulance response times, saying there’s been too many close calls.

Deputy Mayor Denver Brennan – who has also served the community as a volunteer firefighter – launched a survey, asking residents to share their Ambulance NB experiences.

Council will present those survey results to ANB during a meeting between the village and officials in August.

He says although the village is a priority post, with an ambulance and a rapid response vehicle stationed there, often times those paramedics will be sent an hour or more away from the area.

He said it just happened last weekend.

"It was a cardiac call and the ambulance, according to the initial page to the fire department, was 45 minutes away," he said. "The fire department was there for roughly, I’d say, 20 minutes before the ambulance showed up."

Ambulance NB’s 911 emergency response time for a rural area is 22 minutes or less, 90 per cent of the time. For urban areas, it’s nine minutes or less, 90 per cent of the time.

In Blackville, including both emergent and non-emergent calls, that happened 86.4 per cent of the time in May – but as low as 66.7 per cent of the time in January.

Ambulance NB says it’s "looking forward" to the meeting with the village council and fire chief, to "discuss their questions and concerns."

Offload delays – where ambulances are waiting outside hospitals or in hallways to drop off patients – have been an issue in 2022. It causes paramedics to wait with patients, which means they’re off the roads and away from communities.

Horizon Health has promised they’re working on solutions.

Ambulance NB says its latest offload delay data will be available Tuesday.

But Brennan is hoping ANB provides more of an explanation than the offload delays and staffing challenges. He says Blackville has experienced these issues since 2020, and hopes ANB can provide more information on what’s been done over the last couple of years.

And while there’s a strong volunteer fire department, he’s worried something will happen that’s out of their control.

"I mean, they're all trained medically with first aid and CPR but they're not medical clinicians, they're not trained like paramedics and they just don't have supplies that an ambulance or a rapid response unit would have," he said. "So , if they have to respond to a scene for 30 minutes that they’re not prepared to be at, that's when it starts to be unsafe, and risky."

Emergency Departments reopened

After a weekend of temporary closures at Oromocto, Sackville and Sussex, N.B., emergency departments, Horizon Health says all reopened on Monday.

The health network said 54 staff were out Monday after testing positive for COVID-19, but that’s down from over 100 on Friday. Almost half, 26 staff, are in the Saint John region.

Liberal health critic Jean-Claude D’Amours says the province needs a human resources plan to combat the staffing shortages.

But the president of the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians, Dr. Mike Howlett, says these issues are happening across the country.

And its rural services that often see cutbacks first.

"I would say we need targeted investment. We need changes in the system. We need first of all, a better approach, a more radically different approach…" he said in an interview with CTV News Channel. "We have this perfect storm of incredible acute care need, lack of community resources to decant those needs and the emergency departments burdened and the staff that's needed to take care of those patients is decreasing."

Horizon has said the decision to close any ER is done "as an absolute last resort."

"Our pre-existing staffing challenges have been amplified this summer in the wake of a recent rise in COVID-19 activity, as well as the need to provide our staff with vacation time," a spokesperson said Friday. "We are working on a number of strategies aimed at improving ED services in all of our hospitals and are committed to providing sustainable access for residents."