New Brunswick’s opposition parties say the province’s contract with ambulance services provider Medavie needs to be renegotiated to improve response times.
Liberal health critic Rob McKee says the province will continue to see poor results until the contract is negotiated.
“The people of New Brunswick are not being well served when a contract results in bonuses being paid out when actual performance is far less than the performance targets actually reported,” he said.
“The failure to revise this contract is continuing to cost New Brunswick taxpayers money that should not be paid out and is allowing Ambulance New Brunswick (ANB) an out for improving its performances.”
The province’s 10-year contract for ambulance services with Medavie was flagged by former auditor general Kim Adair two years ago. She found that the use of exemptions was allowing Ambulance New Brunswick to collect millions in bonuses even as it regularly failed to meet response time targets, particularly in rural areas.
The contract says ambulances must respond within nine minutes in urban areas and 22 minutes in rural areas 90 per cent of the time, but allows exemptions for things deemed out of their control. Adair said these exemptions allow ANB to say it’s meeting the 90 per cent target threshold, even as actual response times are much worse at the community level.
Then-health minister Dorothy Shephard said the province was open to renegotiating the contract, but two years on, McKee said there has been little improvement in the system.
“If we’re going to continue to allow exemptions under the contract and without incentive to improve service, it’s a problem,” he said.
Green Party health critic Megan Mitton said it’s past time to renegotiate the contract. She wants to see it ripped up, with ambulance services returned to public hands.
“I’d say we need to get out of it as soon as possible. We can’t wait till 2027, we’re already several years in and it’s unacceptable, the performance is not OK,” she said.
Mitton’s riding includes the community of Port Elgin, which received ambulance service within 22 minutes roughly a third of the time in 2022.
Current Health Minister Bruce Fitch told reporters that he is speaking with representatives about how the situation can be improved in the New Year.
“My expectation, you’ll probably see some movement that may not require an opening of the contract but may have an agreement between the parties that alleviate some of the issues that we’re talking about,” he said.
Fitch said the province is also working to improve response times by freeing up additional paramedics for emergency response by introducing emergency medical technicians to help with patient transfers, as well as overall efforts to unclog the province’s emergency rooms by connecting more people with primary health care.
McKee said he had been sent photos showing eight ambulances lined up outside the Georges Dumont Hospital in Moncton on Tuesday, waiting to offload patients.
While appearing before the committee on public accounts earlier this year, officials from ANB said offload delays at hospitals are the main cause of poor response times in the province.
Jean-Pierre Savoie, the vice-president of ANB, says they are expecting that paramedics will spend 30,000 hours tied up in offload delays this year. That’s a 600 per cent increase from 2017-18, when offload delays cost about 5,000 hours, and nearly triple the 11,678 hours spent waiting in 2020-21.
“While not laying blame, it remains that a lot of the solutions lie with the regional health authorities. We’re a service to citizens in terms of bringing citizens to emergency rooms,” said John Estey.
“The unfortunate reality is that paramedics and, more importantly, patients get caught in those offload delays.”
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