Toronto Emergency Services Down to 75% Staffing Levels

macbraughton Posted on June 23, 2009

I’m just trying to get the word out everyone. If you look at the wording of official City of Toronto corporation when it comes to Emergency Services, here are a few quotes:

The official statement from Mayor David Miller (who, BTW, happens to have a twitter page @mayormiller.)

And although impacted by the work stoppage, emergency medical services will continue to operate…

And city councilor for my area, Mark Grimes, put on his twitter page @Mark_Grimes:

I regret the inconveniences caused by the strike. The City is trying to bring this to a quick resolution. Emergency Services are operating.

Because the city is so focused on the lack of garbage collection, the public is still not being told clearly that when you call 911 for an ambulance, there will be less dispatchers to answer the phones, and there will be less paramedics on the road to take patients to the hospital by ambulance. Emergency response times will be affected, how could they not be with only 75% of us working?

In an emergency, seconds can make the difference between life and death. The politicians are therefore playing with people’s lives at this point, asking for unreasonable concessions that will probably end up with the Province of Ontario stepping in and passing legislation, as John Laforet discusses in his blogpost City Negotiators Need to Ask ‘What Would Arbitration Do?’

I received my phone call last night informing me that I am not supposed to come to my scheduled shift for this evening. Please understand, I am not exaggerating, I am an emergency medical dispatcher for the City of Toronto. I was scheduled to go into work tonight. I can personally attest that there will be one less person to answer the phone and dispatch ambulances if you call 911 for an ambulance tonight. I am officially on strike.

Ask yourself, should the City of Toronto be able to put public health at risk for their political maneuvering? This is just plain wrong. The people that are really hurt over this are the sick and elderly, the weak and dying, those who already have no one to stand up for them. Call or email or write the mayor’s office and your local city councilor and tell them that you want 100% of the Emergency Medical Services to be operational!

You can find a copy of Mayor Miller’s statement as well as links to many of the media resources on the Toronto strike at Torontopedia.ca. Please help raise awareness that 911 ambulance dispatchers and paramedics are on strike as well by passing this post on to others. Thank you for your support and comments.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Categories: News, Politics, Rants

  • Judy

    Hey Donnie… I think that people should also know that staffing is at 75% of our minimum. This means that while they usually staff above minimum (at least by 2) they are now going to be 75% of the least we ever have.

    I’m off tomorrow and have heard that lots of us are.

  • Reality Check

    25% less staff on the road means that TRANSFERS are not getting done, and that business is going to private transfer companies. Emergency response times for Delta’s and Echo’s are probably better than before the strike. If any delays are occurring, its due to the EMD’s taking longer to talk people into agreeing they are having trouble breathing or flu like symptoms, or making a call seem like a dangerous crime scene and staging vehicles around the corner because the caller “wasn’t nice to them and wouldn’t answer all the Q/A and SRI questions”.

    Hero’s Don’t Stage.

  • macbraughton

    Well, apparently, Reality Check, hero’s do stage because a hero such as yourself is not willing to identify themselves more than by an incredibly vague and self-righteous pseudonym.

    From your banter I can tell that you have some experience with the system, though you’re antagonistic to both paramedics and dispatchers makes me think that you’re probably a self-loathing dispatcher.

    For the public who has no idea how medical 911 calls are prioritized, Echos and Deltas are our highest priority calls. While I’ve been 25% on strike over the last three weeks, I’ve seen plenty of Echos and Deltas with much worse than usual response times. More often than usual there are more calls coming in than people to answer, also slowing our response.

    I’ve also seen calls that are not considered a high priority wait for hours to be serviced, even when that involved a patient lying on the ground in severe pain the whole time. Granted, a cracked hip is not as high a priority as a heart attack, but from what I’ve heard it is damn painful. I would say leaving somebody who really has no alternative but emergency transport to hospital to wait hours is extremely demeaning and degrading.

    This strike is not good for public health, no matter how the City of Toronto corporation tries to justify it.

blog comments powered by Disqus

Meanwhile in the Twitterverse

Close block