York Region needs better cardiac arrest response times: councilor

Yorkregion.com
March 6, 2017
By Lisa Queen

The time it takes to provide medical care to someone suffering from a sudden cardiac arrest in York Region needs to improve, Markham Coun. Jack Heath says.

The Ministry of Health has set a target time of anyone in the community, including paramedics, using an automatic defibrillator on a cardiac arrest victim to be within six minutes 60 per cent of the time.

Defibrillators can be found in many public buildings such as recreation centres.

Even though York exceeds the ministry’s target, hitting the six-minute guideline 70 per cent of the time, Heath said that’s not good enough.

“I’m pleased with sudden cardiac arrest (response), we’re meeting the target of six minutes 70 per cent of the time. Of course, that means 30 per cent of the time, we’re not meeting the six minutes, and I worry that six minutes certainly may leave someone no longer in distress but passed away,” he said at a regional committee discussion March 2 on paramedic response times.

“I don’t know whether or not I can easily sell that target and sell the performance as being the best the public would expect.”

A report on the region’s response times for 2016 shows paramedics respond to sudden cardiac arrest, major trauma and severe respiratory distress within eight minutes 80 per cent of the time.

“I think our public would like better numbers than that,” Heath said.

“The public would like better numbers than that. We do a good job. But if your father or your mother or what have you has a heart attack, you want them there in three or four minutes, not in eight or nine,” he said.

Sudden cardiac arrest is a very infrequent occurrence, with paramedics responding to about 500 a year among 85,000 calls, Norm Barrette, chief of paramedic services, said.

But because the condition requires the fastest response time, the ministry has set the six-minute community target, he said.

The best way to improve that is to have more defibrillators in the community and to educate more residents about how to respond, Barrette said.

“We have exceptional response times in York Region, and paramedics work very hard each and every day to achieve the shortest times from a 911 call to when paramedics arrive and start taking care of the patient,” he said.

“Paramedics are part of achieving that target but so is the rest of the community. So, how can we make further improvements? It’s really how do we better connect people who are in the community to become engaged.”

Given the size of the region, the mix of urban and rural communities, traffic congestion and high call demand that has increased by 34 per cent over the last five years, paramedics are responding “exceptionally well” to emergencies and are achieving faster response times annually, Barrette added.

Meanwhile, the region has made recommendations over the years to the province to improve the dispatch system, he said.