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Mark Quinn: Ambulance Association National Secretary on the rising number of calls for ambulances · Early Edition with Ryan Bridge

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  Speaker 1: Demand for ambulance's highest on record last year. This is
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  Speaker 1: according to stats from Saint John seven hundred thousand callouts,
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  Speaker 1: thirty percent increase over five years, and the ambulance crews
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  Speaker 1: attending five hundred and fifty thousand of them an average
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  Speaker 1: of fifteen hundred a day. Mark quinn Is with the
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  Speaker 1: Ambulance Association, joins us Now, Hey, Mark, good morning, Ryan,
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  Speaker 1: Good to have you on why is this? Is this
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  Speaker 1: in line with population growth or is it over and
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  Speaker 1: above that?
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  Speaker 2: No, it's over about.
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  Speaker 3: There's a number of factors and there's no single one factor.
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  Speaker 3: But as a population growth, we've got a a tsunami
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  Speaker 3: of over sixty five population coming.
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  Speaker 2: You've got services in certain areas like rural and even
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  Speaker 2: provincial where people straying to get into their GP or
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  Speaker 2: actually have a health service at all in those areas.
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  Speaker 3: And there's in the financial cost because obviously trying to
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  Speaker 3: get in that cost money. Even if I've got a card,
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  Speaker 3: a community service card, that still costs.
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  Speaker 1: What percent of those callouts are actually needed?
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  Speaker 4: Well, that's a good question. So the majority of and
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  Speaker 4: we would say probably cut my information that I've eighty
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  Speaker 4: percent of them were at the lower or lower acuity
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  Speaker 4: patients and those are patients that could probably be be
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  Speaker 4: se seen by a GP or GP type service. And
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  Speaker 4: so sometimes the embulance service, for end is the only
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  Speaker 4: health service in a particular area. So that's why sometimes
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  Speaker 4: we will the services used almost like a pseudo GP
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  Speaker 4: because that's the only way they can access health.
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  Speaker 1: That's not great, So what do we do about it?
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  Speaker 1: But well, i mean, apart from trying to fund them
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  Speaker 1: more on GPS. In the meantime, for you guys, the workload,
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  Speaker 1: I imagine is a little unbearable.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's constant, and it's i mean, it's what we're
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  Speaker 3: there to do. But it has grown from you know,
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  Speaker 3: I've been twenty five years in the inblance services where
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  Speaker 3: we were only really responded to emergency calls, and now
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  Speaker 3: I've seen a complete change where it's dominated by the
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  Speaker 3: lower curity GP type patients. And that's even though there's
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  Speaker 3: a number of initiatives and Saint John have teletrios, remote triarchs,
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  Speaker 3: we have paramedics and emblance obviouss, more skills and medications.
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  Speaker 3: We've got other initiatives, community based initiatives in there, but
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  Speaker 3: they're not keeping pace with the demand and there's still
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  Speaker 3: is at times no national strategy between Emblance service primary
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  Speaker 3: and secondary care health services, and this probably needs to
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  Speaker 3: be more work done in that area. It does require
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  Speaker 3: staff at times, it requires experienced practitioners, but yeah, it's
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  Speaker 3: going to be continue to be a challenge going forward.
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  Speaker 1: Mark, appreciate your time this morning. Thank you, Mark when
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  Speaker 1: the Ambulance Association National secretaries.
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  Speaker 4: For more from Early Edition with Ryan Bridge.
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