No ‘silver bullet solution’ to address ambulance response times: Ambulance NB

The board chair of Ambulance New Brunswick says they are working to improve response times in rural areas, but many of the issues impacting the speed of response are out of their control.

“We’ve a sharp increase in call volumes and the impact of offload delays and staffing challenges. As those pressures on the system have increased, so have our response times,” ANB board chair Ian Watson told the public accounts committee on Thursday.

“There is not a silver bullet solution to these challenges.”

This was the second time in two weeks that staff from Ambulance NB appeared before the legislature’s public accounts committee to face questions from lawmakers, having been summoned back after MLAs felt they were left with unanswered questions from the previous visit.

Liberal MLA Benoit Bourque says he felt that they adequately answered the outstanding questions but says it’s clear that there is a lot of work to do to bring ambulance response times up to where they need to be in rural areas.

“There is no silver bullet … but it doesn’t mean we need to sit on our hands either, so it’s trying to find that balance between knowing we can’t fix it right away but keep working on improving the system and moving the needle as much as possible,” he said.

The rate at which ambulances respond to calls has been a hot button topic for years.

Back in 2020, then auditor general Kim MacPherson highlighted a number of rural communities that received response rates much lower than the target. Watson confirmed that all 19 of those communities are still bellow the target of an ambulance arriving within 22 minutes of the call 90 per cent of the time.

The target for urban areas is to have an ambulance arrive within nine minutes 90 per cent of the time.

The communities of Ford Mills and Port Elgin have some of the worst response rates in the province, with ambulances arriving on time last year just 53 per cent and 48.9 per cent of the time respectively.

But as MacPherson pointed out in her 2020 report, those numbers get averaged with the rest from their corresponding region — which includes the oftentimes better response rates from urban areas — meaning that as per the contract with Medavie Health Services, the 90 per cent target is said to have been met.

Last year, that meant the province paid out a total of $2.7 million in bonuses.

That contract is being renegotiated, but Green MLA Kevin Arseneau says that he’s tired of ANB making excuses for poor service in his area.

“They’re a service provider and they’re supposed to provide services and they’re not providing that service and so they need to be in solution mode a lot more than being in blaming the others mode,” he said.