The city will spend nearly $2 million over the next two years to hire 31 new paramedics to ease stress levels and improve response times — which officials say is necessary even though provincial benchmarks show Hamilton is doing well.
Councillors voted Tuesday to spend $481,864 this year and $1,158,954 in 2016 to add 30 paramedics and one supervisor. They're also poised to approve a capital cost of $1.2 million over the next two years to buy five new ambulances.
These improvements are necessary even though recent provincial benchmarks show that Hamilton has some of the best response times in the province, said Mike Sanderson, chief of Hamilton Paramedic Service.
'No one else in North America measures it that way.'- Mike Sanderson, chief of Hamilton Paramedic Service
The provincial target for reaching a patient in sudden cardiac arrest is six minutes. New provincial numbers show that Hamilton crews hit that benchmark 77 per cent of the time in 2013. That's better than some comparison municipalities such as Ottawa and Waterloo.
But Sanderson said Tuesday that the provincial reporting structure is flawed and compares "apples to oranges." It gives different benchmarks according to the seriousness of the call, he said, as opposed to measuring calls from the time a patient calls for an ambulance until the time the paramedics arrive.
"No one else in North America measures it that way," he said. "It's never been validated. It's not proven."
Hamilton Paramedic Services pays more attention to what the general public sees as a response time — how soon an ambulance arrives after they call, he said.
To that end, it takes an average of 11:42 minutes to get an ambulance in Hamilton. That ranges from 10:59 in the old city of Hamilton to 12:11 minutes in Stoney Creek and 18:35 in Flamborough.
More paramedics and ambulances will make those response times more level, Sanderson said, and also relieve overworked paramedics.
If council approves the budget on April 8, 10 staff will be hired in April, 10 in November and 11 in April 2016. The total cost is $963,729 in 2015 and $3,281,636 in 2016, but the province pays for half of it.
Councillors only approved the operating costs on Tuesday. Funding the ambulances themselves will require reopening the already-approved capital budget and increasing it by 0.05 per cent.
Sanderson originally asked for all of the ambulances and paramedics at once, but councillors opted to space it over two years.
Some councillors, like Coun. Terry Whitehead of Ward 8, are still concerned at the amount of time it takes paramedics to offload patients at hospitals. Whitehead is also concerned that the city is trying to make response times in suburban areas the same as the inner city ones.
"I have a concern that we're taking urban standards and applying it to rural communities," he said.
Hamilton is facing a 3.1-per cent tax increase in its 2015 budget, equal to a $97 increase on the average $284,600 home.
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