Windsor-Essex health care leaders say there is a myth out there that just won't die.
People believe they can call for an ambulance and get into the Emergency Room faster than going in on their own.
It’s happening often enough that Essex-Windsor EMS workers will now deliver patients to the waiting room. This new idea is called “offload to waiting room.”
It’s meant to help free-up ambulances faster, to get them back out on the road in case of critical emergencies.
Whether you walk in on your own steam, or come to emerge on a stretcher, officials say it’s actually your health that determines how fast you see a doctor.
“There is a myth and it has been practiced, where people feel if they call ambulance and EMS they will be seen quicker in the emergency departments,” Bruce Krauter, Chief of Essex-Windsor EMS.
The fact is the sickest patients go to the front of the line, regardless of how they get here.
“Patients taking EMS are triaged no differently than a patient walking through the doors,” says David Musyj, CEO of Windsor Regional Hospital.
Each patient is triaged and assigned a level of who needs help first. A Level 1 is someone whose life is in grave danger. A Level 5 is someone who has been sick for a while, but who is not at risk of dying.
In the last decade, EMS has seen a spike in calls for these lower level patients.
Musyj says the code 3 and 4 responses have gone from just over 30,000 to over 50,000.
“I don't want to class those as nuisance calls, any call somebody calls for us is not a nuisance if they think they really need to call us,” says Krauter.
The chief says their resources are, at times, strained to the limit. So now paramedics will use the new protocol.
If there are more people, sicker ahead in line, this will free up paramedics to get back out on the road.
“That’s a difficult conversation to have with patients but it’s a conversation we're having.”
