Huron County Council Was Presented With A Refreshed Master Plan For County Paramedic Services At Their Last Meeting

by Bob Montgomery

Huron County's Director of Emergency Services says consultant Operational Research in Health produced a ten-year master plan in 2019. That plan looked at where their ambulance bases were located, call volume increases and trends and where they might have to look at up-staffing or changing staffing patterns. They also considered, potentially, where they might have to build new ambulance bases or relocate ambulance bases. Unfortunately, COVID arrived shortly after that presentation was made to council and COVID became the priority so there were some delays in implementing the master plan. Horseman says they were able to move ahead with some of the recommendations in the plan but it's been about five years since that report was presented to county council.

So, they asked the consultant to refresh the report, look at the call volume trends and response times again, and the changes they've made since the first report was presented just to see if they were on the right track and give them new or updated recommendations. That presentation has now been made to county council and at this point council has received the presentation for information and they'll be looking at staff to provide further input on the individual recommendations. Those recommendations include things like an increase in staffing in Bayfield, moving the building in Tuckersmith in Huron East to Seaforth and then declaring the base in Tuckersmith a surplus building and disposing of it. There are also some further staffing pattern changes that have been predicted over the next several years, but other than that the current base locations, with the exception of the one in Huron East, seem to be in the most effective locations so there are no other recommendation for site changes.

Horseman says staffing patterns will have to be increased as the call volumes increase and that's been driven by the fact that our population is getting older, so they tend to need more care. Our population is also growing as more people move into some of the communities in Huron County. He says the call volume is increasing by about 4.4 percent year over year, so over a seven to ten year period that increase becomes significant, and they will need more staff and more resources on the road in order to continue to meet the response times that they've committed to meeting. And council has endorsed that response time.