Ontario family waits 'many, many hours' for ambulance for dad in emergency need: 'Wait kills people'

An Ontario resident and his family suffered an all-too-familiar ordeal when they had to wait "many, many hours" for an ambulance for their father — an issue for which writer Mike Gerald Gibbs blames "the Ford government 100%."

On Sunday, Oct. 15, Gibbs, from Ajax, Ont., posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, that his father had been waiting for an ambulance for hours.

According to Gibbs, a nurse checked his father and declared it as an emergency. The request for the paramedics was made by the nurse.

His tweet got over 300 responses and has since been viewed more than 70,000 times. Many of the replies included people sharing similar experiences and frustration with emergency healthcare across the country.

One reply read:

“I’m sorry. In 2021, it took me 2 days to get a non-emergency ambulance for my dad. He then spent 6 hrs in a hallway.”

Another user responded with a similar experience in which an injured 12-year-old had waited over 90 minutes for an ambulance to arrive.

'You have to be literally dying' to get help

Gibbs wrote follow-ups to his initial tweet, stating his father was “ok” at the moment, but in severe pain and had trouble breathing. He also called out the provincial government, saying you need to be “literally dying” or you will have to wait a long time for emergency assistance.

So far, the responses to Gibbs’ tweet call for change, with Canadians from other provinces chiming in about their emergency services.

Yahoo Canada reached out to Gibbs, but did not hear back by publication time.

No data on 'code black'

Currently, there is no data gathered in Ontario for situations labelled as “code zero” or “code black” — where there are no ambulances available in the region. There is also no agreement on who should be tracking said data. Neither the province nor the municipalities claim responsibility.

Niko Georgiadis, chair of the CUPE Ambulance Committee of Ontario, told The Canadian Press in a July 20 article, that since the province primarily runs ambulance dispatch centres, it should be keeping track of how frequently there are no ambulances available.

However, according to a representative for Health Minister Sylvia Jones, the province does not keep track of such data since municipalities are in charge of ambulance deployment strategies.

While searching through the statistics for his own region, Essex-Windsor EMS Chief Bruce Krauter discovered that between January and May 2023, code blacks tended to occur between 3 p.m. and 11 p.m. He attributes this to the lack of urgent care centres and primary care during those hours and has requested that Jones pay for those services during additional hours.

What do the governing health bodies track?

In accordance with provincial legislation, local towns annually set goals for emergency medical response times. Response times are determined by the Canadian Triage Acuity Score (CTAS), a widely used metric that ranks patient treatment according to severity, indicators, and symptoms.

CTAS is categorized into five levels. CTAS 1, the most prioritized level, is for the severest cases that require resuscitation and immediate aggressive interventions. CTAS 5 is for conditions that may be acute but non-urgent.

In 2022, The Region of Durham, the municipality Ajax belongs to, had a goal of eight minutes per response time with a success target of 75 per cent for CTAS 1 cases. They were only able to achieve their target 63.7 per cent of the time.

The government also collects data on time spent in hospital waiting rooms by paramedics, which is a key factor in response times. However, they do not share the data with the public.