The insignia for the Bruce County Paramedic Services (image courtesy of Bruce County)
Bruce County council received some good feedback about the performance of paramedic services in the county.
County staff had engaged with British consultation firm Operational Research in Health, or ORH, back in 2019 to come up with a 10-year plan.
ORH recently did a review of progress since 2020 to get an idea of how to proceed to the end date of 2029.
Hannah Mayes, a senior consultant with the organization says that the county’s paramedic services has been making strides over the past five years.
“We can see that year-on-year that paramedic services have been meeting those targets. Generally, they have improved a little bit from 2020 through to 2023,” she says. “Generally, the resource enhancements that have been put in place over the last four years have helped to offset some of the demand increases because we haven’t seen a significant drop in performance.”
Since the initial plan was made, changes throughout the county didn’t always match up with what was recommended, but improvements were still seen.
“There have been some slight variations, so for example, a resource was added in Port Elgin rather than Kincardine because of those increases we’ve seen in Saugeen Shores. Sauble Beach has been implemented as recommended. Holyrood is not in yet as a full station post, but there is an attempt there to deploy there from Walkerton when there’s enough of a resource available,” Mayes explains. “In summary, there have been some things that have changed differently from what we had recommended in the review and demand has been increasing – that time-on-job, those call components have been increasing a bit, but paramedic services have broadly laid out their plans in line with the recommendations from the last review.”
ORH reports various metrics and considers how many calls get responded to within 8 minutes, 10 minutes, and 15 minutes. They also report on the average response time.
Looking at the date for following the changes for South Bruce Peninsula and the opening of the new Port Elgin station, performance has improved.
“In order to work out what we think the recommendation should be for five years’ time through to 2029, we have to understand what we think the demand is going to look like,” says Mayes
Models predicting demand are based on population data, the age profile of the population, and demand overall. An aging population will affect the number of calls for service, in addition to average population growth.
