ERIN – If you’ve seen a volunteer firefighter’s flashing green light in Erin or Hillsburgh lately, there’s a good chance they were responding to a call for medical assistance.
Erin and Hillsburgh stations have experienced an outsized increase in the number of calls for medical help in recent years, making it the most prominent type of call to which the department responds.
Paramedics are ultimately responsible for providing emergency health care in the field before arriving at a hospital, but firefighters are often called out as well to lend a hand.
What that looks like varies from hands-on compressions to keep someone’s blood circulating during a heart attack, to getting a set of vital signs.
Heart attacks, choking, burns, electrocutions, car crashes, near drownings, and unconscious residents – Erin’s volunteer firefighters respond to it all in what’s known as a “tiered response.”
The goal of the all-hands-on-deck response is getting as many resources, as quickly as possible, to someone needing help.
Over a four-year period reviewed by the Advertiser, from 2020 to the end of 2023, Erin’s overall call volume increased by 46 per cent to 308 calls in 2023 from 211 calls in 2020.
The increase isn’t related to only medical calls.
There was also a year-over-year increase in the number of vehicle collisions, to 51 in 2023 from 37 in 2022, for example.
However that increase is an anomaly in the years reviewed by the newspaper, during which firefighters responded to between 33 and 37 yearly crashes.
When it comes to medical calls though, there has been a disproportionate increase compared to other call types across the four years, according to reports to town council from Fire Chief Jim Sawkins.
In 2020, there were 53 medical assist calls, rising to a four-year peak of 109 medical calls in 2022, before dropping slightly to 97 calls in 2023.
By comparison, there were 21 fires in 2020, 39 in 2021, and 29 each year in 2022 and 2023.
The share of overall call volume coming from medicals has informed department decisions, such as first aid training and vehicle replacements, since Sawkins became the town’s fire chief in 2019.
Even at that time, upwards of 65% of the department’s overall responses were medically-related, according to the chief.
Sawkins told the Advertiser several factors are responsible for the increase in medical calls.
“We are at the mercy of the ambulance service,” he remarked.
As the Advertiser has reported in recent years, the shared city-county paramedic service has struggled to meet response time targets for more serious calls in the county, which are set by Guelph council because the service is operated by the city.
The blame for lengthier response times has largely fallen at the foot of emergency room doors at Guelph General Hospital, which became a bottleneck of off-load delays in recent years. Paramedic crews have been forced to wait for hours in hallways with their patients – at times for entire shifts – until beds are free and hospital nurses can accept incoming patients.
Acting Guelph Wellington Paramedic Service deputy chief Kerri Mitchell stated in an email the delays have “a direct impact on ambulance availability.”
“Should an ambulance be delayed greater than 20 minutes, [the] fire department would respond to medical calls to render assistance until paramedic arrival,” Mitchell explained.
But Erin firefighters also began responding to any call involving an unconscious person in 2022, likely accounting for an increase in medical responses, Mitchell wrote.
According to the paramedic service, firefighters responded to 40% of all medical calls in Erin in 2023, and treated just 4% of the patients. Most of the medical calls firefighters attended last year were for unconscious people, or those who had no vital signs, according to the paramedic service.
