For second straight year, Ottawa paramedic response times fall short of benchmark
Despite a small improvement, the Ottawa Paramedic Service is still falling short of a council-set benchmark for how long it should take to respond to life-threatening emergencies, according to the service’s 2016 annual report.
The provincially-legislated response time for life-threatening calls is eight minutes from the first unit being notified of the call for service to a paramedic arriving on the scene.
The City of Ottawa has set a benchmark that paramedics meet that target 75 per cent of the time.
In 2016, the service’s response time performance was 73.2 per cent, a slight uptick from the previous year when it was 72.5 per cent.
However, the paramedic service’s performance has dropped 10 percentage points since 2013.
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Coun. Eli El-Chantiry has called for the city to speed up the hiring of paramedics to deal with shortages in the past.