The Guelph-Wellington Paramedic Services held a soft opening of its new paramedic station on Wednesday.
The centralized facility will provide better response times for those situated in the downtown core.
The current post, situated at 614 York Road, will still serve as a location for paramedics to sign on to their ambulances at the start of their shift while providing a backup facility as paramedics work from the new station to uncover any potential technical issues.
The downtown depot is expected to have a grand opening in January, at which time it will become the downtown centralized location closer to the hospital and will allow for crews to respond to situations in a timely manner.
As it stands, the lease on the building will be in place for a minimum of 10 years.
“We’re really happy to have a facility in the downtown core, happy to have our home, and we’ve been using two different temporary locations for quite a while and it is great to have our own home,” said Stephen Dewar, general manager of Guelph Wellington Paramedic Services.
The 5,000 sq/ft building is located on the corner of Gordon and Fountain streets, just west of the Guelph Police Headquarters.
“We have looked at our best locations to respond from in the downtown core – the downtown core of Guelph has a high call volume – and we did do some analysis of the best locations and this was definitely in the zone,” said Dewar.
Citing delays attributed to COVID, the new station was originally expected to open in April of this year.
Dewar said he places the blame on the complications around the renovations that needed to happen, but mostly on the construction delays that arose.
“We wanted it done right, we wanted to make sure we had the resources that we needed,” said Dewar.
One issue that popped up was no heating in the garage, which is crucial to the temperature-sensitive medications housed in the back of ambulances.
“The problem was they would either have to put a heater in the back of an ambulance and unplug it before they went out on a call, or let’s do it right and fix the heat in the garage,” said Dewar.