Toronto

We are supposed to have 40 minutes to offload a patient into a bed, sometimes change their clothes, attach them to equipment, or help them to the washroom; provide a report to the triage nurse; clean and disinfect our stretcher and ambulance; restock our supplies; complete our paperwork; and debrief with our partner. Now, dispatch updates us to say we only have 33 minutes.

I’ve been a paramedic in Toronto for three years, and for two years before this in Guelph. My name is Parker Palmer, though that’s not my real name — to write this article, I have to use a pseudonym. Our contract prevents us from speaking openly about our employer, and writing the article under my own name could jeopardize my career.

Since then, these issues have skyrocketed, made worse by the pandemic. They culminate in “code reds,” times where there are zero available ambulances in the city. According to freedom of information (FOI) documents, Toronto Paramedic Services reported an average of 5 hours and 31 minutes in code red per day in 2022, or 23 per cent of each day. The city says 2023 was better, reporting 2 hours and 24 minutes per day with less than 10 per cent ambulance availability. (They haven’t yet released data for the amount of time spent in code red).

The crisis in our ERs is decades in the making. In Ontario, a series of governments — first the Liberals and now Doug Ford’s Conservatives — have cut funding to our healthcare system. Canada is an outlier among OECD countries, with one of the lowest numbers of hospital beds per capita. And Ontario ranks worse than all other provinces.

Many of the paramedics I interviewed for this article tell me the same thing: funding preventative health care to help patients avoid serious medical issues is the number-one way governments should begin to address this crisis. That money is being spent anyway, on repeat ER visits by chronically ill patients and, increasingly, on paying private companies to fill in the gaps.