The fire chief of a small New Brunswick community says it took an ambulance more than 30 minutes to arrive at a cardiac arrest call over the weekend, which he says may have resulted in the middle-aged man’s death.
Ligouri Turbide, chief of the Baie-Sainte-Anne Fire Department, says members of his crew responded to the call at around 10 p.m. on Saturday.
Firefighters performed CPR on the 49-year-old man for half an hour, waiting for an ambulance to arrive, Turbide says. When the paramedics arrived, they continued to perform CPR on the man for another half hour but could not revive him and he was pronounced dead.
Turbide later found out the ambulance had to come from Miramichi – nearly 50 kilometres away.
“I wasn’t too happy regarding that,” Turbide told Global News in a phone interview Monday. “That ambulance should have been here.”
“I know they’re short-staffed and whatever, but in this scenario, if the ambulance would have been on scene, it might have been a different story. We’re 30 minutes away from Miramichi and that’s the closest ambulance?”
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Chief Turbide later shared the experience on his Facebook and the post was shared over 260 times within 24 hours.
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“I know their system is having a hard time lately, but I want things to change,” he said.
“I don’t want to wait two years for things to change neither.”
He says this isn’t the first time an ambulance has been late. A year and a half ago, Turbide says a woman went into cardiac arrest and, once again, firefighters were required to perform CPR for over 30 minutes until ambulances arrived.
That woman, too, passed away.
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In a statement to Global News, Ambulance NB says there were two ambulances from the Miramichi district busy responding to calls when the one from Baie-Sainte-Anne came in.
Chisholm Pothier with Ambulance NB says it took the ambulance from Miramichi 34 minutes to respond.
“We had serious challenges this weekend,” Pothier stated. “A lot of positions were vacant for various reasons, including vacation and sick time, with more than 100 vacancies in total Saturday.’
“We cannot say enough about the people who do show up at these times and keep the system going … The reality is we face human resources challenges, as does every health profession.”
Pothier added that the ambulance system in New Brunswick exceeds its contractual standard and does so “at a time when call volumes have increased by 20 per cent in the last five years.”
“New Brunswickers have a good ambulance system and anyone suggesting otherwise is misinformed and attempting to mislead,” Pothier concluded.
Shortly after winning the election, the Conservative New Brunswick government announced it would be “putting lives over language” by scraping bilingual hiring requirements for paramedics in some mainly unilingual regions.
But a Court of Queen’s Bench judge has ruled that loosening the bilingual requirements for paramedics would violate the Official Languages Act and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Turbide believes that was a step in the right direction and is calling for paramedics to receive a salary increase, with hopes of attracting more young people to the industry to address the shortage.
“It shouldn’t be a wage problem, because right now it’s a life problem,” he said. “Money shouldn’t be an issue for life problems, and I think right now it is.”
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