Ambulances face record waits to drop patients at Winnipeg hospitals

Hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars are being spent for Winnipeg ambulances to sit idle in front of hospital emergency rooms.

Last year the Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service started charging for the time its ambulances and paramedics spend waiting to off load patients at city hospitals. It bills the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority $113 per hour after a 60 minute wait.

But rather than solving the hospital wait time problem, it’s only gotten worse.

In May of this year – waiting hit a record with Winnipeg paramedics spending almost 17-thousand hours in ambulance bays or the equivalent of 141 paramedic shifts.

The WRHA says part of the problem comes with a 13% increase in the number of people using emergency rooms in the last 5 years, many who don’t need emergency services. It’s created a backlog of patients according to WRHA Chief Operating Officer Real Cloutier.

He says solutions are in the works to encourage people who aren’t emergency cases to go elsewhere.

But Chris Broughton, a paramedic who is also a union representative, says many of the WRHA’s solutions won’t help the delay in off-loading patients. He says the way emergency calls are handled needs an overhaul: something he hopes will happen after the province finishes a provincial review of EMS services, but fears won’t happen until there is tragedy.