WELLINGTON/GUELPH – Responses times in Guelph and Wellington County are unlikely to improve without additional funding, county council heard this week.
According to Joint Social Services and Land Ambulance Committee chair county Coun. Dave Anderson at a county council meeting Thursday morning, the City of Guelph is looking at bringing on more staff and expanding services but "it's geared to funding and the amount of money that's going to come through the budget."
A report on paramedic service response performance in 2023 and the performance plan in 20
25 said heightened call volumes and the complexity of calls and hospital offload delays, especially in the first quarter of the year contributed to response time delays.
This response wasn't good enough for county coun. Michael Dehn, asking whether residents should expect response times to worsen without additional funding.
"I'm still concerned with the response time improvements for the ambulance ... I don't know if (the City of Guelph's) current strategies are really working," said Dehn, during the meeting. "We've been experiencing a lot of offload delays at the hospitals and the times are not materially improving ... and I think that's a concern, especially for rural residents."
In 2023, the Guelph Wellington Paramedic Services (GWPS), met provincial compliance rates for the second-most critical injuries/illnesses and for the least serious injuries/illnesses, but did not reach the set targets for four other categories including sudden cardiac arrest.
The average response time in Wellington County in 2023 was 9:54. The City of Guelph's average response time was 6:38.
Erin and Mapleton currently have "less than ideal response times," as Dehn put it, with averages of 13:28 and 11:50.
"As someone in the community who may be comfortable with those components percentages, until your loved one is laying on the floor and needs medical care, then you'll see that 61 per cent compliance for a (sudden) cardiac arrest is not okay," said county coun. James Seeley, agreeing with Dehn.
Warden Andy Lennox said the city has decided to proceed with recruiting the second paramedic shift adopted in the 2024 multi-year budget, which was previously paused.
Lennox has also requested city staff come back with insight into how the county can further enhance response times and what that might cost so they "can understand the levers of control" the county can exercise and try to ensure residents "are looked after properly."
Isabel Buckmaster is the Local Journalism Initiative reporter for GuelphToday. LJI is a federally-funded program.
