The study reports 5.98 million patient visits to emergency departments in the province in 2019, of which about 84 percent did not arrive by ambulance.
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Overview About the Campus Community Engagement Fast Facts Governance History of McMaster How to Get to McMaster Policies, Procedures & Guidelines Presidents Message Provost & Vice-President. Of the nearly 954,000 patients rushed to Ontario’s emergency department by ambulance in 2019, about two-thirds (nearly 608,000) were discharged without being hospitalized, the study shows. McMaster Home Brighter World Daily News Teaching Excellence Faculty & Staff Directory Website Directory Discover McMaster. emergency clinics or clinics for general medicine,” said Strum. “I think there’s a huge opportunity for paramedics to look at these factors and transport patients to other healthcare destinations that provide equivalent care to see and treat them more quickly and potentially at a lower cost, such as: B. That puts the paramedics and their ambulance off the street and unable to answer calls.
When a less urgent patient is brought into an already crowded emergency room, paramedics must stay until nurses can take care of the patient. The study’s authors raise questions about whether more could be done to divert non-emergency patients from Ontario’s already congested emergency rooms. Nearly 485,000 such patients were rushed to emergency rooms by ambulance in 2019, according to the study. The study also breaks down ambulance demand by disease severity using the Canadian Triage and Acuity Scale (CTAS), the standard rating used by paramedics and medical staff in emergency departments across the country.Ībout half of all patients transported to the emergency department by ambulance were classified as CTAS level 3 or urgent, which includes symptoms such as chest pain without the characteristics of a heart attack, mild to moderate shortness of breath, or vomiting a small amount of blood. Among age groups, the largest rate of growth in ambulance use from 2010 to 2019 was among 18-39 year olds. Use of this directory for bulk email, spam or commercial purposes is STRICTLY PROHIBITED.
This Directory is to be used for official McMaster Communication ONLY. People ages 65 and older accounted for 42 to 44 percent of annual transports during the decade of the study. Use any of the fields below to search McMaster’s faculty and staff directory. “They have exhausted other avenues and are going to 911 because they know the service is immediately available,” Strum said in an interview.ĭemand increased in all Ontario regions and in all age groups. Strum’s analysis suggests there’s a common theme of people increasingly relying on calling an ambulance because of limited access to the rest of the healthcare system. The paper suggests that there are a number of reasons for the disproportionate increase in ambulance use, including “difficulty accessing primary health care, a lack of timely access to care, the patient’s perceived situation, a sense of superior care in the community.” hospital and lack of awareness of other health services.” The authors say their findings demonstrate the need to find ways of addressing the growing demand for ambulance services, such as giving paramedics the scope to transport less urgently ill patients somewhere other than emergency departments.Accounting for Ontario’s population change, the researchers calculated that ED transports increased 26.2 percent over the decade, far outpacing the 3.4 percent growth in patients arriving at EDs using other modes of transport during that period came. It comes at a time when Ontario is seeing unprecedented waits in hospital emergency rooms and frequent " level zero" incidents, which means there are no ambulances available to respond to calls in a jurisdiction. "What our work points to is that this current model of transports is likely unsustainable for the province," said Ryan Strum, the lead researcher for the paper and a PhD student at McMaster who also works as a paramedic.ĬBC News has obtained a copy of the peer-reviewed study in the August edition of the Canadian Journal of Emergency Medicine. It found a 38.3 per cent increase in the number of ambulance patient transports to ERs over the decade, an increase four times larger than the province's 9.6 per cent population growth over the same period. The study was led by researchers at Hamilton's McMaster University and it looked at the yearly numbers of patients transported by ambulance paramedics to hospital emergency rooms across Ontario from 2010 to 2019. A new study finds ambulance use in Ontario increased significantly in the years leading up to the pandemic, outpacing the growth in both population and hospital emergency room visits by other means.
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