The release of the Burnaby Fire Department’s annual report was as good a reason as any for council to criticize ambulance response times in the city.
At Monday’s council meeting, Coun. Colleen Jordan highlighted the types of calls that the fire department responds to, and noted that more and more of them are medical emergencies.
“The 2013 annual report…shows that 59.2 per cent of the calls that our fire department responds to are classified as medical emergencies, and that doesn’t include another 1,500 motor vehicle incidents,” she said.
“In total, that’s 70 per cent of the callouts that our fire department responds to. The fire service is becoming much more of a rescue service than a fire service.”
Jordan noted proper paramedic service was a hot topic at the recent Union of B.C. Municipalities conference and said that in the past four years, there’s been no increase in paramedic service in Burnaby.
Mayor Derek Corrigan clarified that the Burnaby Fire Department is happy to respond to non-fire emergencies, but stressed that inadequate ambulance service, paired with backups at Burnaby Hospital that may delay paramedics from getting to their next call, can be a matter of life and death.
“We don’t mind that we’re the closest to the scene, but the program is exacerbated when in fact it takes a half-hour for a paramedic vehicle to arrive,” he said, calling on the provincial government to step up the service levels for B.C. municipalities.
“I hate to be complaining about the level of service by another order of government, but this just isn’t satisfactory, both in the sense of the hospital being able to service properly and in the sense of the paramedics being available to us.”
In April, Burnaby Fire Chief Doug McDonald criticized B.C. Emergency Health Services for downgrading certain types of medical emergencies, causing longer wait times for ambulances. He cited several incidents, including a 21-minute wait for an ambulance after a local man went into cardiac arrest.
That incident prompted Burnaby-Deer Lake MLA Kathy Corrigan, then the NDP critic for Public Safety and Corrections, to call on Health Minister Terry Lake to order an investigation into the incident.
- With files from Cornelia Naylor
