WATCH: A Port Coquitlam mother is upset after she ended up taking her son to the hospital when it took too long for an ambulance to respond.
A situation this week involving the the BC Ambulance Service, Coquitlam RCMP, Port Coquitlam Fire Department, and two young children is bringing to light some of the issues arising from new protocols.
It started when Angie Dwinnell’s three-year-old son was hit in the head with a shovel by a four-year-old he was playing with in the back yard.
“I think they should have been on scene right away,” says Dwinnell.
“They”, in this case, is the BC Ambulance Service. Instead, twenty minutes after 911 had been called, RCMP and the Port Coquitlam Fire Department were on scene – but not an ambulance. Frustrated, Dwinnell took her bleeding son to the hospital in her neighbour’s car.
“I was very disappointed, considering it was a 4-year-old child. I could see if it was an adult, but not a child,” she says.
But in this case, the BC Ambulance Service says they followed all correct protocols.
“The system worked well,” says Linda Lupini, Executive Vice-President of BC Emergency Health Services.
“We do understand there is a level of anxiety for people on the scene and parents and families, but everybody acted appropriately given the information they had at the time.”
The reasons for the delay were twofold.
First, the person who phoned 911 told them someone was assaulted and they were hearing screaming, according to Lupini.
“We have to follow policies that are safe for our paramedics,” she said. “In hearing there was screaming and an assault where they didn’t have a visual…the RCMP asked us to stand by.”
They were subsequently told the situation was safe and a paramedic could enter the scene – but they needed confirmation from the RCMP.
“Our policy is we don’t cancel our ambulance just because the fire department tells us to. We have to call the person that initiated the call,” says Lupini.
“The subsequent information gave us a clearer picture of what was going on. It was obviously a safe situation, and it obviously wasn’t as serious as the RCMP originally thought.”
After confirming with the RCMP that the situation was safe for them to enter, an ambulance was dispatched, ten minutes after the call. But because it was not a life-threatening situation, it was classified as a Code 2 response.
Two years ago, changes were made to BCAS protocol to give higher priority to life-threatening “lights and sirens” situations, known as a Code 3 response.
It means sometimes ambulances are diverted to attend to more urgent calls – and that happened in this case.
“Six minutes later, we indicated that the car that had been standing by was called to a code three call,” says Lupini.
The next car was on its way, twenty minutes after the 911 call was made, when Port Coquitlam Fire phoned BCAS, telling them that Dwinnell had left.
“It’s a lack of us knowing in these types of situations what to tell people,” lamented Nick Delmonico, Chief of the Port Coquitlam Fire Department.
“We don’t know the ambulance is going to be 10 minutes, we’ve had waits as long as two hours…we fully get what BCAS is trying to do in getting to the serious calls faster, they just left this part of the equation out: What do we tell people, and how do we deal with the huge delays in the less intense calls?”
But Lupini says, ironic as it sounds, that from a process standpoint, everything worked as it should.
“This wasn’t a call that said ‘I’m a mom, my child just got hit in the head, my child is three.’ That’s an automatic code three and we would be there. The initial information didn’t give us enough information to know that,” she says.
The child, after having six stitches inserted in the hospital, is now back home.