Ambulance crews are hanging around the emergency department longer this year than last, waiting for beds at Ridge Meadows Hospital so their patients can be admitted.
According to the B.C. Ambulance Service, in March of this year, crews spent a total of 24 hours waiting with patients before they could be admitted.
That’s a 149-per-cent increase above the 9.8 hours spent waiting in March 2012.
Superintendent Lisa Crowder shared the details during an update at Maple Ridge council’s Monday committee meeting, while director of operations Tim Philley said B.C. Ambulance meets regularly with Fraser Health about the issue.
Mayor Ernie Daykin wanted to know why wait times have increased and said later it could be a matter of creeping up to previous wait times, following reductions made after the opening of the new emergency department.
The longer ambulance drop-off times in March, though, seem to be a statistical blip.
Tasleem Juma, with Fraser Health, said emergency room visits can spike during March.
“We’ve seen, anecdotely, any time there’s spring break … we usually see an increase in emergency department visits.”
That’s because many family doctors are out of town, forcing people to go to the hospital to treat their ailments.
When the long-term average wait times are considered, Ridge Meadows Hospital has reduced its wait times for ambulance drop-offs thanks to its new Rapid Assessment Zone – which speeds emergency treatment for minor ailments without having to admit patients.
“That certainly has sped up the process of patients through the emergency department,” Juma said.
Apart from March – which saw more than a doubling of the average “off-load delay” time from 18 to 48 minutes compared to March 2012 – January, February and April all showed drops in the average ambulance wait times when compared with the same month in 2012.
In February this year, the average wait time for dropping off a patient and allowing ambulance crews to get back on the road was cut in half, from 48 to 24 minutes, and in April, from one hour to 36 minutes.
And for the Fraser Health region overall, off-load delays have decreased by 28 per cent since March 2012.
“I was really pleased when I looked at the longer term data that showed a decrease,” Juma said.
Crowder said the length of delays are determined by the number of beds available.
And while wait times have climbed in Maple Ridge, they’ve dropped throughout the Fraser Health region as whole.
Ambulance crews spent a total of 431 hours waiting to offload patients last March, down from 598 hours in March 2012 – a 28-per-cent drop.
B.C. Ambulance figures show that, in 2011-12, ambulance crews responded to an average of 16 calls (911) a day in Maple Ridge, a jump of six per cent from the year before.
In the same time period, Maple Ridge had 3,600 urgent Code 3 calls, while Pitt Meadows had 700.
Two ambulances are based in Maple Ridge 24 hours a day, as well as one public response unit. Average response time for an ambulance is about 11 minutes.
When statistics for all of B.C. are considered, the number of calls has stabilized. About 30 per cent of all calls for ambulances are for emergencies, while the rest are for medical transfers.
A dispatch system allows for creating waiting lists for less-urgent calls in order to give priority to emergencies, thus minimizing the number of ambulances responding to critical incidents with lights and sirens.